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

If you are interested in a performance comparison of Mercurial and Git have a look at this article The conclusion is Git and Mercurial both turn in good numbers but make an interesting trade-off between speed and repository size Mercurial is fast with both adds and modifications and keeps repository growth under control at the same time Git is also fast but its repository grows very quickly with modified files until you repack and those repacks can be very slow But the packed repository is much smaller than Mercurial s

The mercurial website has a great description of the similarities and differences between the two systems explaining the differences of vocabulary and underlying concepts As a long time git user it really helped my understand the Mercurial mindset

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

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

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

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

This link may help you to understand the difference http www techtatva com 2010 09 git-mercurial-and-bazaar-a-comparison

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

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

I think the best description about "Mercurial vs. Git" is:

"Git is Wesley Snipes. Mercurial is Denzel Washington"

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?