JuanPablo Scaletti

Mercurial vs Git

As someone who hasn’t used Hg before, I’m curious — what are some examples of Git commands that are better executed in Hg?

No specific commands really, but I think the whole hg UI is just more consistent. I use both, yet with git I have to revert to `man` almost every day :/

Compare: `git branch xxx / git branch -a`, `git tag xxx / git tag -l`, `git show-ref —heads` To: `hg branch xxx / hg branches`, `hg tag xxx / hg tags`, `hg heads` There are also “duplicates” that I’m not sure why aren’t folded into one command: `show-branch/branch`, `show xxx` which is `diff -c xxx` in many other systems, etc. 

These are just simple cases, but there’s loads of situations where you have to find out yet another command in git / yet another parameter to do what you want. Hg has better defined defaults and the whole list of commands looks like it was designed, while git looks like everyone just added what they needed…

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In some situations I also think that git does exactly what it’s programmed to do… which isn’t always the same as - what workflow makes sense in a specific case. For example `branch` creates a branch, but you still need to do `checkout` (or just `checkout -b …`). Why? What’s the common use case for creating a branch you’re not going to work on? Which behaviour do you expect more often?

All in all, not the end of the world, but when you use the tool every day, it becomes annoying, especially if you see it can be done better.