I switched from git to Mercurial and was absolutely gobsmacked by how much better it is. The only comparison was switching from a Blackberry to an iPhone - everything just works exactly the way I want it to.
Yes, I read the manual for git, but I never needed to for Mercurial.
I guess you didn't start from cvs or svn, because the experience moving to git was otherworldly. If git was your first versioning system than you had to learn some concepts first, which you already internalized when you switched to Mercurial.
Due to my workplace I moved from svn to hg (awesome experience) and then from hg to git (terrible experience). That was years ago, and the git experience remains terrible.
If you're interested, can compare tfs to git. Maybe it's ide integration quality, but FWIW:
1) tfs: shelves are named and can be worked with independently; git: stashes are numbered in a sort of a stack and only the top stash is unpacked and deleted destroying your data, infuriating, also local edits are moved into the stash, not copied.
2) tfs: branches are mapped to different folders and can be worked on simultaneously; git: branches are mapped to single folder and switching branches deletes local edits.
3) tfs: pulling from server merges new text preserving local changes; git: pull and checkout deletes local changes.
4) tfs: can't commit unresolved merge conflicts; git: commits just fine, it's also not obvious if you have merge conflicts to commit or not.
5) tfs: handles concurrent edits as merge conflicts and handles them as they occur; git: you create feature branches and in case of concurrent branches you have merge conflicts when you merge to master, then you have p.4. Feature branches are advertised as a big fat killer feature of git, but I don't quite see the win here, you still have merge conflicts.
6) tfs: all commits in a branch are visible, it's not obvious how to delete them, you can only create rollback commits; git: if something happens to the branch label, the commits are gone.
> 1) tfs: shelves are named and can be worked with independently; git: stashes (...)
I don't think your comparison makes sense. Git stash is a way to quickly get to a clean local workspace that can be reversed as you see fit. You use local branches to track independent work.
> tfs: can't commit unresolved merge conflicts; git: commits just fine
Again, this doesn't make sense. In git, users determine whether a conflict is resolved or not. If you commit a changeset originating from a merge conflict, you have to explicitly state that the conflict was resolved and your changes are good.
> Feature branches are advertised as a big fat killer feature of git, but I don't quite see the win here, you still have merge conflicts.
Honestly I didn't understood what point you tried to make. Merge conflicts happen because multiple sources of change touch the same document region in a way that can't be resolved automatically, thus needing human intervention. To the best of my knowledge, there is no cvs in the world that eliminates merge conflicts.
Regarding Git's support for feature branches, the fact that you don't understand the big win Git brought to the world with it's branching model is already a testament to how groundbreaking Git was at the time, and how everyone around was quick to roll out Git clones that follow the same approach. To see what I mean, spend a day working with a SVN repository trying to do work involving feature branches.
> git: if something happens to the branch label, the commits are gone.
Aren't you actually saying that if you delete a branch then the branch is deleted?
I assume tfs and svn work with feature branches the same way. In my experience with feature branches in tfs they were a hindrance, not a win.
Local branches store immutable state, but shelves can be unpacked anywhere (like a stash), thus local changes carry over, but git deletes them on every occasion.
In a nutshell, git has an unintuitive and unfriendly CLI with bad defaults.
I want my VCS to be quiet, out of sight and do as it's told, because my main focus should be programming, not how to tame a tool that's supposed to save text. The fact that you have to "learn git", and that there are so many StackOverflow git question on how to do (what should be) trivial operations is probably a hint that things aren't great in the usability department.
For hg, I just read an introductory guide (I think it was Joel Spolski's one) and that was enough. I used to be able to do a more in-depth comparison and criticism but nowadays I use git and try not to think about it too much.
> In a nutshell, git has an unintuitive and unfriendly CLI with bad defaults.
I see this claim often, but it never is accompanied by evidence or any concrete example.
I've been using Git for years and I never noticed any semblance of unintuitiveness or bad defaults. Everything in the happy path is straight-forward, and all obscure things are a quick googling away.
Do you actually have any concrete example to back your claims? What's the absolute best example you can come up with of said unintuitiveness and unfriendliness?
In case I wasn't clear, "git has an unintuitive and unfriendly CLI with bad defaults" when compared to hg.
Just compare the man pages! "git help clone" vs "hg help clone".
A random (trivial) example off the top of my head. When working with branches:
> git pull
> git switch another-branch
Your branch is behind 'origin/another-branch' by 2 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.
(use "git pull" to update your local branch)
... why? I literally just pulled, why are you asking me to pull again? 99% of the people on the planet literally want the last version of that branch (provided there's no local changes leading to a conflict).
Compare with hg:
> hg pull
> hg update another-branch
Done.
I haven't worked with hg in a long time so I can't really provide an "absolute best example". All I can say is that, from memory, hg always got out of the way, and when I wanted to do something out of the ordinary I could either guess how to do it or it was easy to figure out from the manual.
With git, almost nothing's easy. It can become easy if you invest a lot of time in understanding how it works internally (which explains some of its CLI choices). But that to me is a sign of a bad tool. "all obscure things are a quick googling away" - why expose the user to obscure things to begin with?
The entire CLI is badly designed, with highly non-orthogonal commands interacting in unexpected ways. Recent versions of git has started introducing commands with a more top-down design (e.g. git switch), but that's a very novel development
Git also diverged significantly from the SVN command line, but instead of following the tasteful Darcs path of making commands clearer and cleaner it commonly:
- reused the same terms for different operations, usually less intuitive ones (e.g. the absolutely awful "git revert")
- removed clear commands to confusingly tack them onto others (e.g. "git add" to resolve commits)\
On that front, mercurial extended the existing commands-set much more cleanly and clearly.
Mercurial's CLI felt like an improved extension of SVN's, Darcs felt like a drastically different take with plenty for it, Git's felt like one of those ransom letters cut out of newspapers, full of jangly bits which make little sense, and concepts which worked fine altered for no perceivable reason.
The fact, e.g., that it's a completely different operation than checking out a single file or folder? (One changes HEAD, one doesn't. One warns about overriding local changes, one doesn't, etc.)
My experience is the opposite. Most of the staunch Mercurial supporters came from CVS or SVN and found Mercurial to fit better into their preexisting mental model of source control.
Users that started with Git are more likely to internalize Git's concepts as "the natural way to do version control", and more likely to find Mercurial counterintuitive.
Not my experience. As it happens, Mercurial and Git are very similar in terms of the "mental model" required to use them: history is just a DAG, and common operations consist of navigating the history and creating/editing/re-organizing commits.
But where mercurial shines with a clean, consistent and simple UX, git is a mess where storage-layer abstractions leak to the user and where single commands serve multiple unrelated purposes.
To give you a practical example, any command that takes commit(s) as argument (for checking-out, logging, rebasing, …) would be passed a `revset` in mercurial-land. Revsets are a simple DSL to address commits (by hash, lineage, topology, distance, …), which makes new commands easy to learn, and renders one third of `git help log` inadequate. Most commands that output something use templates as argument, which renders another half of `git help log` laughable.
There is nothing "natural" about the git UX, you've got to accept that it grew organically with no attention to details.
I really love git for the way it has taught me so many things by being so exposed. I love that you can easily use it as p2p, via email as a server or client, as a ci/cd solution. I love that you can easily inspect its model with cat. I love that while “branches” and “tags” seem special, you could just as easily use its “notes” or even just tack on your own ref system willy-nilly.
All this to say, I love git, and as a versioning system, it seems obvious to me that we can do better than git for 90% of workflows. Just yesterday I was surprised by how `git push --tags` worked and had to read the man page for `git-push` to see I wanted `git push --follow-tags`. Just reading this forum today I see that I alternately probably(?) could have figured out what I wanted with `git help push` which I didn’t even really realize was a thing.
But do I want to use an easier versioning system? I’m not sure. git has a kind of forcing function for a growth mindset. I value it for its creative expressivity.
Edit for sibling comment: Stockholm Syndrome, quite possibly. But as the “victim,” I still love git!
heh, I'm highly sympathetic of what you say :) . I also got to use git after being told how awesome it was, by people who themselves were told how awesome it was, and so on and so forth. And for many years, I was a believer, too, and probably heightened the bar of what I found acceptable as a result.
That's not to downplay git qualities, but as a social experiment in soft peer-pressure and group-thinking, I think it has value (though that's beyond my field of expertise).
I came to mercurial when, after shooting myself in the foot with git for the N-th time and going on a rant about it, someone on IRC told me to give mercurial a shot and move on with my life. I confess that TortoiseHG helped me translate my git habits into the equivalent hg commands, and the kind of history exploration that I was doing then set me up to speed with the revset way.
Then, what I found formidable was that all the knowledge about git intricacies that I had accrued and internalized with pride over the years became absolute no-brainers and irrelevant in the hg world: I remember a famous stackoverflow thread in 10 steps for merging two unrelated repos (including arcane git commands, shelling-out to sed, and non-transactional storage-level ops that would warrant a backup, as was the norm back then). How do you get history from a repo in hg? `hg pull`. How would you go about getting history from a repo (unrelated) in hg? `hg pull` as well. And thinking about it, would have git been nicely designed, it wouldn't have had to care about the difference and even less so had to expose it to the user.
Mercurial, although not perfect, really opened my eyes on what good UX design should look like.
People don't internalize Git concepts as "natural", they get Stockholm Syndrome.
I'm not saying mercurial is better, but there's a reason I have to remind people that this[1] is satire - the real manuals are so convoluted that they seem like parodies of themselves.
There are two reasons Git is better, and the UI is NOT one of them: speed and repository format. I think Keith Packard wrote about this best: Git is technically under the covers way superior over Hg, it's not even a competition. For usability, I think with Sapling we finally get some real competition and that might be the user interface alternative we need, as well as the monorepo approach it was basically made for, but let's just say that I don't trust people who think Mercurial is technically even close to a good idea.
I think the problem arises from when you switched to hg from those older systems and grew accustomed to it and then were FORCED to switch to git because of work or whatever.
I feel like the Mercurial fanbase is just another loud fanbase. I did start with CVS and SVN and git was absolutely fantastic when I started using it. On the other hand I could never get the hang of Mercurial. From MY PERSONAL perspective it has a terrible UX(which is the exact opposite experience of the loud hg fan git critics on HN). I absolutely cannot relate to the people who say that Mercurial has the better UX, but I don't remember myself constantly bashing mercurial either like the other side does. From my perspective `git add -p` is an important essential functionality that hg does not provide. I believe there was some sort of plugin but it was no where near as polished.
Yes, there are a handful of nice features in mercurial, but none which are actually necessarily needed inside of the git core.
I do faintly remember that my biggest problem with git was understanding that a commit doesn't push automatically. But then again that's just a difference between a DVCS and whatever was there before.
Having used svn, git, mercurial then back to git (with the last two at the same job, the business unit having decided to move from mercurial to a git-based solution) and I've preferred mercurial to git, where it feels like there's more possible foot-guns and its features don't bring enough value to justify the increased complexity when using it .
What are the changes that Mercurial has? I've read many times that Mercurial is easier but I've never seen the reasons. The times I've used mercurial (mostly to download a repo) it doesn't look that different, and other than the staging area weirdness I don't find git too difficult.
You know how when using git you have to add tons of flags to every command to make it do what a sane person would actually want? Mercurial just does what you want.
I'm going to be blunt and state that what most people want is not what they actually need. If you use Git for how it was designed, the commands remain generally pretty clean. If you come from an SVN mindset, you are probably not really using Git the way it was designed, and Mercurial fits better.
I have used (actually introduced) Mercurial before at a company and considered them basically equivalent enough, only to get stuck in some horrible design choices of early Mercurial (named branches and not having rebase by default). I am happy to see these elements corrected in Sapling, giving me enough confidence that I might actually use Sapling over time...
Yes, I read the manual for git, but I never needed to for Mercurial.