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I really hope this becomes a debugged real tool. Mercurial's UI makes intuitive sense and git's is just a bunch of magic incantations. Git's builtin help and do

I really hope this becomes a debugged real tool. Mercurial's UI makes intuitive sense and git's is just a bunch of magic incantations. Git's builtin help and documentation are also useless. I can easily use Mercurial offline without a Google search window open. That's impossible for me with git.

acdha 7y ago
Having used both extensively, that sounds awfully hyperbolic. Neither is perfect but “magic incantations” is really a stretch — to be honest, it sounds like you’re reading with intention of looking for reasons to dislike it. I started with Mercurial at least a year before Git and found roughly as many areas where I preferred either one. Having taught a number of people how to use the basics over the years, I’m highly skeptical of claims that either is a substantial barrier compared to learning how to use a version control system and work well with other contributors.
- likpok 7y ago
  I switched to mercurial a couple years back, and generally found it a much smoother and nicer experience. It can't do anything that git can't do, but the basic operations felt much better. A summary of the stuff I liked: histedit feels much more natural than rebase -i, and I rarely need to look up arguments. When rebasing, I frequently found that I needed to look up what was what of the three refs git can take (source, dest and onto). hg undo, unamend and split take complicated flows in git and make them trivial. I don't think I ever got as good an understanding of the hg model as I had with git, but I had to get that understanding because I screwed up my repo and wanted to fix it. I've never done that in hg.
  - acdha 7y ago
    See, this is a useful comment: it avoids hyperbole and has specific details people can understand even if they don’t agree with every point. I have only once had a VCS lose data, but that was amusingly the opposite: mercurial, before they had a standard rebase-like mechanism, so the only takeaway I’d draw is that a feature like that needs to be very well tested.
bsder 7y ago
> Git's builtin help and documentation are also useless. It even worse. Git makes certain things bloody near impossible. Want to find deleted files across all branches in git? Good luck. In Mercurial, it's "hg log --template "{rev}: {file_dels}\n" So, the most reliable solution to finding deleted files in git is to convert the repository and then run the query in hg. <facepalm>
- urxvtcd 7y ago
  What about: git log --name-only --diff-filter=D --all --pretty="format:deleted in commit %h"

acdha 7y ago

Having used both extensively, that sounds awfully hyperbolic. Neither is perfect but “magic incantations” is really a stretch — to be honest, it sounds like you’re reading with intention of looking for reasons to dislike it. I started with Mercurial at least a year before Git and found roughly as many areas where I preferred either one. Having taught a number of people how to use the basics over the years, I’m highly skeptical of claims that either is a substantial barrier compared to learning how to use a version control system and work well with other contributors.

likpok 7y ago
I switched to mercurial a couple years back, and generally found it a much smoother and nicer experience. It can't do anything that git can't do, but the basic operations felt much better. A summary of the stuff I liked: histedit feels much more natural than rebase -i, and I rarely need to look up arguments. When rebasing, I frequently found that I needed to look up what was what of the three refs git can take (source, dest and onto). hg undo, unamend and split take complicated flows in git and make them trivial. I don't think I ever got as good an understanding of the hg model as I had with git, but I had to get that understanding because I screwed up my repo and wanted to fix it. I've never done that in hg.
- acdha 7y ago
  See, this is a useful comment: it avoids hyperbole and has specific details people can understand even if they don’t agree with every point. I have only once had a VCS lose data, but that was amusingly the opposite: mercurial, before they had a standard rebase-like mechanism, so the only takeaway I’d draw is that a feature like that needs to be very well tested.

bsder 7y ago

> Git's builtin help and documentation are also useless. It even worse. Git makes certain things bloody near impossible. Want to find deleted files across all branches in git? Good luck. In Mercurial, it's "hg log --template "{rev}: {file_dels}\n" So, the most reliable solution to finding deleted files in git is to convert the repository and then run the query in hg. <facepalm>

urxvtcd 7y ago
What about: git log --name-only --diff-filter=D --all --pretty="format:deleted in commit %h"