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Mercurial Reviews & Product Details

Janaka B.
JB
Software Engineer
Computer Software
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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(Original )Information
What do you like best about Mercurial?

Quite easy for beginners to get hands-on experience with version control

HTTPS- or SSH-based flexible authentication

Simplified branching for hassle-free feature developments and version management

Extension system for incrementally enabling advanced features

Most commands are simpler than corresponding equivalents in Git etc

Ability to run local Mercurial servers for demonstration/syncing purposes

Good IDE support, often via solid third-party plugins

Deep OS/filesystem integration (e.g. context menus) via TortoiseHg and similar utilities Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

Lack of support for some advanced features like --depth support in cloning

Inability to discard closed branches

Lack of in-built pagination support for long outputs (e.g. commit log, unlike in Git)

Inability to maintain staged changes while making further modifications (e.g. Git allows a file to be added to the commit stage and further changes to be made, the latter not being automatically added to the stage) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

If you are looking forward to incorporating advanced features like branch cleanup, symlinks or shallow clones in the future, reconsider Git instead; if you are pretty sure that you wouldn't need such, then Mercurial is a really good and convenient choice! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

Mercurial is the main tool for versioning the source code of our internal and client projects; it helps us version-control our sources with less hassle, boosting our productivity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mercurial Overview

What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.

Mercurial Details
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Product Description

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.


Seller Details
Year Founded
2005
HQ Location
Boston, MA
Twitter
@MercurialScm
225 Twitter followers
LinkedIn® Page
www.linkedin.com
1 employees on LinkedIn®

Recent Mercurial Reviews

Verified User
A
Verified UserMid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
4.0 out of 5
"Mercurial is a source control management tool"
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive inter...
Verified User
U
Verified UserMid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
4.5 out of 5
"Mercurial has lots of functionality "
I really enjoy mercurial extensions and the flexibility they provide
IG
Ines G.Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
4.0 out of 5
"powerfull and portable"
In contrast to comparative apparatuses (Git), Mercurial is extraordinarily simple to utilize and cleaned. It gives you the advantage of running a _...
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30 out of 31 Total Reviews for Mercurial

4.2 out of 5
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30 out of 31 Total Reviews for Mercurial
4.2 out of 5
30 out of 31 Total Reviews for Mercurial
4.2 out of 5

Overall Review Sentiment for MercurialQuestion

Time to Implement
<1 day
>12 months
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48+ months
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Verified User in Education Management
AE
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Review source: G2 invite
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Mercurial?

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

I didn't went through any disadvantages after using this tool Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

Traditional version control systems such as Subversion are typical client-server architectures with a central server to store the revisions of a project. In contrast, Mercurial is truly distributed, giving each developer a local copy of the entire development history. This way it works independent of network access or a central server. Committing, branching and merging are fast and cheap. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

IG
servidor e ingeniero en servicios sociales
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Review source: G2 invite on behalf of seller
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Mercurial?

In contrast to comparative apparatuses (Git), Mercurial is extraordinarily simple to utilize and cleaned. It gives you the advantage of running a _distributed_ variant control framework without the issue of waiting be a direction line master. On Mac, both I and the group utilized the direction line as often as possible, yet we learned on Windows with an astounding GUI customer (Tortoise). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

The facilitating alternatives for network Mercurial undertakings aren't as cleaned as those for Git. Everybody knows (and likely uses) GitHub. Irregular is restricted to self-facilitating or less-cleaned devices like BitBucket or (destined to be dead) Google Code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

We had various designers taking a shot at a solitary, inheritance codebase who might much of the time venture on each other's adjustments in a brought together VCS. Irregular helped us rapidly increase with a conveyed work process without the expectation to absorb information required for progressively granular (read: order line-based) devices. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Computer Software
UC
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Review source: G2 invite
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(Original )Information
What do you like best about Mercurial?

I really enjoy mercurial extensions and the flexibility they provide Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

I wish there was wider support from other sources Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use mercurial for version control Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Information Technology and Services
UI
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
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Review source: G2 invite
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What do you like best about Mercurial?

Like most source code control systems, Mercurial tries to force a particular methodology on its users for no good reason. However, the underlying system is sufficiently powerful and there are enough extensions available that it's possible to work around this bias. The "every repo can be a server" capability is also very important. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

Reliability is barely acceptable - it's much too easy to get a repo into an unusable state (and no extension are required for this to happen). Recovering from incorrect operations is much too difficult - unlimited rollback should be possible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

Make sure it matches your development process Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

Source code maintenance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Information Technology and Services
UI
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Review source: G2 invite
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What do you like best about Mercurial?

The like that this revision-control tool is distribuited. So you can commit on your local system the changes that you make and when everything is done you can push the changes on a remote system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

I dislike the native tool of merging differences in hg workbench(the ufficial tool of this sw). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

This software allows us to work in team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Elifarley C.
EC
IT Specialist
Telecommunications
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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What do you like best about Mercurial?

Ease-of-use when performing operations like branching, merging, rebasing, reverting file changes, stripping commits, access control to files and branches based on user names and groups.

Besides that, it's very well written (in Python), modular, and easy to extend / modify. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

Not as wildly known as Git, and even though it has support for git-based repositories as well, it's got some rough edges at that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

Don't be afraid to use Mercurial just because it was not created by Linus Torvalds! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed to have easier control over branching and merging operations, and we also needed better user access control to files and branches. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rory D.
RD
Programmer
Construction
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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What do you like best about Mercurial?

Mercurial has all the features of a good distributed revision control system. Not only is it incredibly useful as a collaboration tool, I find the ability to track changes and rollback to a specific revision invaluable for working by myself too. Mercurial lets you easily see, down to each line of code, when it was first introduced and why, and tools like hg bisect make tracking down bugs much faster. There are many good graphical frontends such as TortoiseHg and SourceTree that make using Mercurial easier, as well as integration with most popular IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse and IntelliJ. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

The biggest issue we've had with Mercurial is the lack of a built-in system for file locking, which is a necessity when working with large binary files that can't be merged. Because of this we still use Perforce for some projects, although there doesn't seem to be any other distributed version control system that handles this issue as it's inherent in the distributed model, which in turn brings many benefits.

Recently Mercurial seems to be falling by the wayside in terms of support compared to git, which has a very similar feature set. This is probably just due to the popularity of GitHub, but the trend in external tools, editors and IDEs seems to be to support git first.

Performance in handling large files is still subpar when compared to Perforce, although again this may be an underlying architectural issue to do with the distributed vs centralised model. Overall performance is still very good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

Honestly its feature set at this point is so similar to git that I don't see any reason to switch if you're already using that. Starting a new project or coming from another system such as SVN, it is definitely worth considering, and there are scripts to convert repositories from SVN, git and most other popular services while retaining full history. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

At my work we have dozens of Mercurial repositories for most of our code projects that aren't using git. It has become an essential part of our workflow working and collaborating with each other. We also use Jenkins CI and have a server set up to monitor several repositories for changes, which can automatically trigger builds and unit test runs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Andrew L.
AL
Software Engineer
Information Technology and Services
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Review source: G2 invite
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What do you like best about Mercurial?

I like how simple the commands are compared to git. It's a distributed version control software, so it gives you that power. When git is too confusing or overkill, mercurial is very nice. Mercurial also has measures in place that prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

With such wide adoption of git, mercurial can begin to lag behind on some of its plugins, especially those that allow interoperability with different repos. If you're using mercurial just as-is with it's own repos, you should enjoy it quite well. The way you use mercurial differs from how you'd use git by subtle means, so it's a bit tricky to grasp at first. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

If you're not good at git, but want to get off of SVN and don't want to invest so much time in learning it, try mercurial. I think it's a great tool. I just both git and mercurial interchangeably Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use it for my personal projects, and those with small developers working on it simultaneously. I'd imagine it'd scale well, as Facebook is using it for massive things. But I only use it with that. The benefits is the simplicity, WAY easier to use than git. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Paulo C.
PC
Software Engineer
Information Technology and Services
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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What do you like best about Mercurial?

- Easy to use

- Works as it should :D

- Widely supported (Although not as much as git)

- Good Desktop UIs available (TortoiseHg, etc)

- Good Web UIs available (Bitbucket, etc) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

- CLI commands are equivalent, but not the same as Git, SVN, etc.

- Not as popular as Git, therefore not supported by Github, Gitlab and others Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

If you are getting started and prefer using an UI, I suggest tortoiseHg

If you are working with a huge repository, try HgwatchmanExtension Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

- Store source files in a centralized repository

- Code reviews before changes are merged

- Everyone can work on their on copies of the repository at the same time Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Christophe M.
CM
Software Development Tools Manager
Telecommunications
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Review source: G2 invite
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Mercurial?

Mercurial is an Open Source very powerful DVCS. It is at the level of Git but with a much simpler user interface and one which provides a smooth transition from a centralized system like Subversion to a DVCS. It is written in Python and is thus portable: Linux but also MacOS, Windows are fully supported.

What I most like in Mercurial is its very gradual learning curve: even if you are not a version control specialist you can easily set it up for personal or group usage.

However, you can also add powerful extensions: rebase, transplant, bisect, large files, etc. You can use the phase mechanism to decide whether it is safe or not to allow history rewriting, you can install and use TortoiseHg, a very intuitive portable GUI, etc.

Also, a service such as bitbucket provides a web service to collaborate with your friends or colleagues on code with pull requests, as they have been popularized by Github. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Mercurial?

What I dislike most in Mercurial is that.. it is not more widely use!

Git is becoming very popular, even in companies previously using Subversion, Perforce, or Teamwork. People know git commands and so have difficulties with mercurial differences in: branches philosophy (Mercurial branches are more long-lived, while lightweight branches like in Git are similar to bookmarks in Mercurial), fetch/pull commands which are opposed in Mercurial and Git, etc. If you are heavily using both, like I do, you need to think twice before pulling or fetching! And even more when undoing mistakes, or you run the risk of loosing data.

Besides this lack of popularity which sometimes makes it difficult to work with others, Mercurial does not really have shortcomings in my honest opinion.. It "just works"! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Mercurial:

I very recommend the use of Mercurial, one of the most powerful and easy to use DVCS currently available. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Mercurial solving and how is that benefiting you?

Version Control is a service of paramount importance for any software producing work: being able to merge and revert changes, work together, review changes, find bugs with bisect, etc. With web services such as Bitbucket you can in addition collaborate with other developers worldwide. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.