Unbreaking Mercurial
I've been using Mercurial (also known as hg) as the version-control system for a project at work. I'd heard good things about it - a Git-like system with a cleaner UI and better documentation - and was glad of the excuse to try it out. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by what I found. The docs are good, and the UI's a bit cleaner, but it's still got some odd quirks - the difference between hg resolve and hg resolve -m catches me every bloody time, for instance. Unlike Git, you aren't prompted to set missing configuration options interactively. Some of the defaults are crazy, like not sending long output to a pager. And having got used to easy, safe history-rewriting in Git, I was horrified to learn that Mercurial offered no such guarantees of safety: up until version 2.2, the equivalent of a simple commit --amend could cause you to lose work permanently. Easy history-rewriting is a big deal; it means that you never have to choose between committing frequently and only pushing easily-reviewable history.
But I persevered, and with a bit of configuration I was able to make hg more like Git more comfortable. Here's my current .hgrc:
[ui]
username = Pozorvlak
merge = internal:merge
[pager]
pager = LESS='FSRX' less
[extensions]
rebase =
record =
histedit = ~/usr/etc/hg/hg_histedit.py
fetch =
shelve = ~/usr/etc/hg/hgshelve.py
pager =
mq =
color =
You'll need at least the username line, because of the aforementioned lack of interactive configuration. The pager = LESS='FSRX' less and pager = lines send long output to less instead of letting it all spew out and overflow your console scrollback buffer. merge = internal:merge tells it to use its internal merge algorithm as a merge tool, and put ">>>>" gubbins in files in the event of conflicts. Otherwise it uses meld for merges on my machine; meld is very pretty but not history-aware, and history-aware merges are at least 50% of the point of using a DVCS in the first place. The rebase extension allows you to graft a sequence of changesets onto another part of the history graph, like git rebase; the record extension allows you to select only some of the changes in your working copy for committing, like git add -p or darcs record; the fetch extension lets you do pull-and-merge in one operation - confusingly, git pull and git fetch are the opposite way round from hg fetch and hg pull. The mq extension turns on patch queues, which I needed for some hairy operation or other once. The non-standard histedit extension works like git rebase --interactive but not, I believe, as safely - dropped commits are deleted from the history graph entirely rather than becoming unreachable from an active head. The non-standard shelve extension works like git stash, though less conveniently - once you've shelved one change you need to give a name to all subsequent ones. Perhaps a Mercurial expert reading this can tell me how to delete unwanted shelves? Or about some better extensions or settings I should be using?
But I persevered, and with a bit of configuration I was able to make hg more like Git more comfortable. Here's my current .hgrc:
[ui]
username = Pozorvlak
merge = internal:merge
[pager]
pager = LESS='FSRX' less
[extensions]
rebase =
record =
histedit = ~/usr/etc/hg/hg_histedit.py
fetch =
shelve = ~/usr/etc/hg/hgshelve.py
pager =
mq =
color =
You'll need at least the username line, because of the aforementioned lack of interactive configuration. The pager = LESS='FSRX' less and pager = lines send long output to less instead of letting it all spew out and overflow your console scrollback buffer. merge = internal:merge tells it to use its internal merge algorithm as a merge tool, and put ">>>>" gubbins in files in the event of conflicts. Otherwise it uses meld for merges on my machine; meld is very pretty but not history-aware, and history-aware merges are at least 50% of the point of using a DVCS in the first place. The rebase extension allows you to graft a sequence of changesets onto another part of the history graph, like git rebase; the record extension allows you to select only some of the changes in your working copy for committing, like git add -p or darcs record; the fetch extension lets you do pull-and-merge in one operation - confusingly, git pull and git fetch are the opposite way round from hg fetch and hg pull. The mq extension turns on patch queues, which I needed for some hairy operation or other once. The non-standard histedit extension works like git rebase --interactive but not, I believe, as safely - dropped commits are deleted from the history graph entirely rather than becoming unreachable from an active head. The non-standard shelve extension works like git stash, though less conveniently - once you've shelved one change you need to give a name to all subsequent ones. Perhaps a Mercurial expert reading this can tell me how to delete unwanted shelves? Or about some better extensions or settings I should be using?