What I like about Git over Mercurial is some stuff that may seem weird to others. - The octopus tree merge, I use it much more than I previously thought I did

What I like about Git over Mercurial is some stuff that may seem weird to others. - The octopus tree merge, I use it much more than I previously thought I did looking at some of my non-public repositories. - having branches that have completely different history (never did figure out how to do this with Mercurial) - read-tree, filter-branch, and a whole range of other tools to re-write history or change somethings location and all that fun jazz. - tracked branches, makes git push/pull easier - the staging area and being able to select different parts of a patch to commit separately (This is by far one of the most important ones) - amending a commit, rebasing and altering history isn't just supported it is recommended, and makes commits from multiple different sources look much cleaner in a tree view (more linear history). This is definitely great in a company where mainline may move fairly fast and rebasing by developers is a way to have the history look linear, without merging "master" into a feature branch. - Git has support for short-lived play branches, Mercurial has this as well with hg strip, but it is an extension and not part of the core, or you have to clone a full repository, makes working with others harder too as I can't just push the play branch up to my clone on the server (assuming a Github model). I've found that once I realised how Git works under the hood that it made so much more sense, not only that I feel that it is more powerful, for example here is a gist of something I recently did for a repo at work: https://gist.github.com/878192 https://gist.github.com/878192 This helps with other internals projects in that we are not pulling in the full "master" branch, instead we are just pulling in a very specific sub-set of files, which is easy to keep updated with git pull -s subtree. I'm sure that I have only touched the least significant parts of what Git has to offer, and that there is so much more waiting for me, but that is my reasoning and why I like it so much.