# Mercurial

121 Hacker News commenters recommended Mercurial and 43 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 19 years (7 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a friendlier, more predictable alternative to Git with clear commands and branch history kept in commits, though critics call it slow and short on Git-centric tooling.

## Why people recommend it

- Friendlier and easier than Git (11 comments): "The difference is that Mercurial lets you duck it until you need it while Git slaps you in the face with it at every commit." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176164)) "Mercurial was definitely friendlier for people who didn't have time time to go through the technicalities of git." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173449)) "I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and performance needed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172291))
- Clear, predictable command names (4 comments): "Commands with obvious names that allow moving around without understanding chains of dependencies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175240)) "You get the best of both worlds--a sane set of commands and a distributed version control system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45889949)) "The Mercurial CLI has clear, well named commands that are predictable and easy to memorize." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173217))
- Branches and real history preserved (5 comments): "I liked the Mercurial branching model better than git, due to the branches being a first class record of events." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172707)) "Branching in Mercurial is as good as or better than in git, but it takes a few minutes of additional reading" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173062)) "Mercurial provides more value out of the box than git because it preserves branch info in commits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775004))
- Used internally by Facebook, Google (2 comments): "Around 20 years ago Facebook made the same choice, so you're in good company in terms of technically sophisticated shops." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172338)) "Both Facebook and Google internally use a custom version of mercurial, so I wouldn't count it out just yet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174787))

## What people warn about

- Slow because written in Python (3 comments): "Mercurial has a strictly superior API. The issue is solely that OG Mercurial was written in Python." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758213)) "Mercurial was a competitor to Git that was written in Python and lost partly because it was way too slow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222563)) "Mercurial is too slow. Even with chg common commands like `hg status` may take hundreds of milliseconds." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526806))
- Ecosystem and tooling favor Git (4 comments): "Mercurial never had an equivalent platform push, which turned out to matter more than any of its technical merits." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48229286)) "mercurial had it figured out and got completely ignored because of the dominance of git's monoculture" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182537)) "Mercurial was way easier to use and fit our use case but all the tooling was built for git." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172523))
- Disliked branching and revision numbering (3 comments): "Mercurial’s branching model was very poor, and its sequentially numbered revision system was and remains a very bad design." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172606)) "the lack of real branching and the need to use DirState or Queues for selective commits made Mercurial feel too much like p4" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45987436)) "needing to make up a name for your branch before committing (unless you like rewriting) was not awesome" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172862))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Git](https://hackerapproved.com/p/git.md): 814 recommend
- [Jujutsu (jj)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jujutsu.md): 335 recommend
- [jj (Jujutsu)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jj.md): 115 recommend
- [Fossil](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fossil.md): 106 recommend
- [Subversion](https://hackerapproved.com/p/subversion.md): 54 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Mercurial", https://hackerapproved.com/p/mercurial/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).