Git vs Mercurial

I’ll post my findings on why I prefer one over the other here.

Pro Git

  • feature branch workflow that doesn’t leave dangling branches all around (hg clone is a workaround imo).

Pro Mercurial

  • hg is one character shorter than git
  • hg st is many characters shorter than “git status” – it’s much more convenient
  • hg can reference commits using a short number and not only hashes
  • hg serve

Cons Git

  • None yet really.

Cons Mercurial

  • It’s Python. Clients use Windows. Too often a non-optimal match.

Other Thoughts

Eclipse is moving to Git.

With just a few branches and simple workflow, MercurialEclipse has served well. EGit just recently became useful enough for day-to-day work.

Gitorious is nice (and free), I’ve not seen a similar tool for Mercurial yet.

2 thoughts on “Git vs Mercurial”

  1. No, hadn’t seen aliases actually, and yes – I still think it’s easier to work with “hmm, something happened in commit 1834 which wasn’t in 1811” as opposed to “a48f3 vs a83f7”. I’ve been using repl though to “stay in git mode” on command line (regarding aliases).

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