I ve been using git for some time now on Windows with msysGit and I like the idea of distributed source control Just recently I ve been looking at Mercurial hg and it looks interesting However I can t wrap my head around the differences between hg and git Has anyone made a side-by-side comparison between git and hg I m interested to know what differs hg and git without having to jump into a fanboy discussion

These articles may help Git vs Mercurial Please Relax Git is MacGyver and Mercurial is James Bond The Differences Between Mercurial and Git Edit Comparing Git and Mercurial to celebrities seems to be a trend Here s one more Git is Wesley Snipes Mercurial is Denzel Washington

Git is a platform Mercurial is just an application Git is a versioned filesystem platform that happens to ship with a DVCS app in the box but as normal for platform apps it is more complex and has rougher edges than focused apps do But this also means git s VCS is immensely flexible and there is a huge depth of non-source-control things you can do with git That is the essence of the difference Git is best understood from the ground up from the repository format up Scott Chacon s Git Talk is an excellent primer for this If you try to use git without knowing what s happening under the hood you ll end up confused at some point unless you stick to only very basic functionality This may sound stupid when all you want is a DVCS for your daily programming routine but the genius of git is that the repository format is actually very simple and you can understand git s entire operation quite easily For some more technicality-oriented comparisons the best articles I have personally seen are Dustin Sallings The Differences Between Mercurial and Git Reddit thread where git-experienced Dustin answers his own git neophyte questions He has actually used both DVCSs extensively and understands them both well and ended up preferring git

There s one huge difference between git and mercurial the way the represent each commit git represents commits as snapshots while mercurial represents them as diffs What does this means in practice Well many operations are faster in git such as switching to another commit comparing commits etc Specially if these commits are far away AFAIK there s no advantage of mercurial s approach

I think the best description about Mercurial vs Git is Git is Wesley Snipes Mercurial is Denzel Washington

If you are a Windows developer looking for basic disconnected revision control go with Hg I found Git to be incomprehensible while Hg was simple and well integrated with the Windows shell I downloaded Hg and followed this tutorial hginit com - ten minutes later I had a local repo and was back to work on my project

Yet another interesting comparison of mercurial and git Mercurial vs Git Main focus is on internals and their influence on branching process

If you are migrating from SVN use Mercurial as its syntax is MUCH more understandable for SVN users Other than that you can t go wrong with either But do check GIT tutorial and HGinit before selecting one of them

The big difference is on Windows Mercurial is supported natively Git isn t You can get very similar hosting to github com with bitbucket org actually even better as you get a free private repository I was using msysGit for a while but moved to Mercurial and been very happy with it

I work on Mercurial but fundamentally I believe both systems are equivalent They both work with the same abstractions a series of snapshots changesets which make up the history Each changeset knows where it came from the parent changeset and can have many child changesets The recent hg-git extension provides a two-way bridge between Mercurial and Git and sort of shows this point Git has a strong focus on mutating this history graph with all the consequences that entails whereas Mercurial does not encourage history rewriting but it s easy to do anyway and the consequences of doing so are exactly what you should expect them to be that is if I modify a changeset you already have your client will see it as new if you pull from me So Mercurial has a bias towards non-destructive commands As for light-weight branches then Mercurial has supported repositories with multiple branches since always I think Git repositories with multiple branches are exactly that multiple diverged strands of development in a single repository Git then adds names to these strands and allow you to query these names remotely The Bookmarks extension for Mercurial adds local names and with Mercurial 1 6 you can move these bookmarks around when you push pull I use Linux but apparently TortoiseHg is faster and better than the Git equivalent on Windows due to better usage of the poor Windows filesystem Both http github com and http bitbucket org provide online hosting the service at Bitbucket is great and responsive I haven t tried github I chose Mercurial since it feels clean and elegant -- I was put off by the shell Perl Ruby scripts I got with Git Try taking a peek at the git-instaweb sh file if you want to know what I mean it is a shell script which generates a Ruby script which I think runs a webserver The shell script generates another shell script to launch the first Ruby script There is also a bit of Perl for good measure I like the blog post that compares Mercurial and Git with James Bond and MacGyver -- Mercurial is somehow more low-key than Git It seems to me that people using Mercurial are not so easily impressed This is reflected in how each system do what Linus described as the coolest merge EVER In Git you can merge with an unrelated repository by doing git fetch lt project-to-union-merge gt GIT INDEX FILE git tmp-index git-read-tree FETCH HEAD GIT INDEX FILE git tmp-index git-checkout-cache -a -u git-update-cache --add -- GIT INDEX FILE git tmp-index git-ls-files cp git FETCH HEAD git MERGE HEAD git commit Those commands look quite arcane to my eye In Mercurial we do hg pull --force lt project-to-union-merge gt hg merge hg commit Notice how the Mercurial commands are plain and not special at all -- the only unusual thing is the --force flag to hg pull which is needed since Mercurial will abort otherwise when you pull from an unrelated repository It is differences like this that makes Mercurial seem more elegant to me

[git] What is the Difference Between Mercurial and Git?

They are almost identical. The most important difference, from my point of view (I mean, the reason that got me to choose one DVCS over the other) is how the two programs manage branches.

To start a new branch, with Mercurial, you simply clone the repository to another directory and start developing. Then, you pull and merge. With git, you have to explicitly give a name to the new topic branch you want to use, then you start coding using the same directory.

In short, each branch in Mercurial needs its own directory; in git you usually work in on single directory. Switching branches in Mercurial means changing directories; in git, it means asking git to change the directory's content with git checkout.

I'm honest: I don't know if it's possible to do the same with Mercurial, but since I usually work on web projects, using always the same directory with git seems much confortable to me, since I don't have to re-configure Apache and restart it and I don't mess my filesystem everytime I branch.

Edit: As Deestan noted, Hg has named branches, which can be stored in a single repository and allow the developer to switch branches within the same working copy. git branches are not exactly the same as Mercurial named branches, anyway: they are permanent and not throw away branches, like in git. That means that if you use a named branch for experimental tasks even if you decide to never merge it it will be stored in the repository. That's the reason why Hg encourages to use clones for experimental, short-running tasks and named branches for long-running tasks, like for release branches.

The reason why a lot of Hg users prefere clones over named branch is much more social or cultural than technical. For example, with last versions of Hg, it's even possible to close a named branch and recursively remove metadata from changesets.

On the other side, git invites to use "named branches" which are not permanent and are not stored as metadata on each changeset.

From my personal point of view, then, git's model is deeply linked to the concept of named branches and switch between a branch and another withing the same directory; hg can do the same with named branches, but yet it encourages the use of clones, which I personally don't like too much.

Examples related to git

• Does the target directory for a git clone have to match the repo name? • Git fatal: protocol 'https' is not supported • Git is not working after macOS Update (xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools) • git clone: Authentication failed for <URL> • destination path already exists and is not an empty directory • SSL_connect: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL in connection to github.com:443 • GitLab remote: HTTP Basic: Access denied and fatal Authentication • How can I switch to another branch in git? • VS 2017 Git Local Commit DB.lock error on every commit • How to remove an unpushed outgoing commit in Visual Studio?

Examples related to version-control

• How can I switch to another branch in git? • Do I commit the package-lock.json file created by npm 5? • Project vs Repository in GitHub • Remove a modified file from pull request • Git push: "fatal 'origin' does not appear to be a git repository - fatal Could not read from remote repository." • Git: How to squash all commits on branch • git: updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do not have locally • Sourcetree - undo unpushed commits • Cannot checkout, file is unmerged • Git diff between current branch and master but not including unmerged master commits

Examples related to mercurial

• Convert Mercurial project to Git • Mercurial: how to amend the last commit? • Discard all and get clean copy of latest revision? • Mercurial undo last commit • How to save username and password with Mercurial? • Mercurial — revert back to old version and continue from there • Is there any way to delete local commits in Mercurial? • How to correctly close a feature branch in Mercurial? • How can I switch to a tag/branch in hg? • What is the difference between hg forget and hg remove?

Examples related to comparison

• Wildcard string comparison in Javascript • How to compare two JSON objects with the same elements in a different order equal? • Comparing strings, c++ • Char Comparison in C • bash string compare to multiple correct values • Comparing two hashmaps for equal values and same key sets? • Comparing boxed Long values 127 and 128 • Compare two files report difference in python • How do I fix this "TypeError: 'str' object is not callable" error? • Compare cell contents against string in Excel

Examples related to dvcs

• Pushing to Git returning Error Code 403 fatal: HTTP request failed • Git push won't do anything (everything up-to-date) • Mercurial — revert back to old version and continue from there • How do I show the changes which have been staged? • How can I stop .gitignore from appearing in the list of untracked files? • Undo working copy modifications of one file in Git? • What's the best three-way merge tool? • What is the Difference Between Mercurial and Git?