If you're coming from git, this is what you need to do to understand Mercurial: don't worry about Mercurial's branches, ever. Whenever you want to use the term

If you're coming from git, this is what you need to do to understand Mercurial: don't worry about Mercurial's branches, ever. Whenever you want to use the term 'branch' from git, translate it to 'bookmark'. Mercurial's branches correspond more directly to svn's branches--they're immutable properties of a revision--but it's not a terribly useful property, and you can forget about them entirely and be perfectly productive. Although note that unlike git, you don't need to use Mercurial's bookmarks since Mercurial is perfectly happen to let commits sit around without having names pointing to them.