Mercurial

“mercurial had it figured out and got completely ignored because of the dominance of git's monoculture”

“Mercurial is too slow. Even with chg common commands like `hg status` may take hundreds of milliseconds.”

“Git (and Mercurial) allowed doing version control without an internet connection for the first time”

“Suddenly I was able to teleport myself to a version from before the lunch while SVN history was crystal clear.”

“plenty have failed that might otherwise have succeeded because of that too. For example Mercurial.”

“Mercurial never had an equivalent platform push, which turned out to matter more than any of its technical merits.”

“Mercurial was a competitor to Git that was written in Python and lost partly because it was way too slow.”

“I use Mercurial more than git and I rarely commit everything in my working directory in a single commit”

“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.”

“Commands with obvious names that allow moving around without understanding chains of dependencies.”

“Both Facebook and Google internally use a custom version of mercurial, so I wouldn't count it out just yet.”

“It just worked. They understood the mental model and happily used it to protect their stuff.”

“You also get stable identifiers for commits that remain the same even after being manipulated”

“every mercurial user I know can intuitively use `hg rebase` with its `-s` and `-d` flags”

“Mercurial was definitely friendlier for people who didn't have time time to go through the technicalities of git.”

“I always preferred Mercurial to Git, but now that Jujutsu is out there, I think Mercurial's demise is all but guaranteed.”

“The Mercurial CLI has clear, well named commands that are predictable and easy to memorize.”

“virtually everything in mercurial was slightly better-designed, more user-friendly, and more polished”

“Branching in Mercurial is as good as or better than in git, but it takes a few minutes of additional reading”

“hg's usage metaphor hews closer to the received wisdom of people coming from stuff like subversion and perforce”

“needing to make up a name for your branch before committing (unless you like rewriting) was not awesome”

“it had a lot of nice features for instance hg came with a web server/interface out of the box”

“I liked the Mercurial branching model better than git, due to the branches being a first class record of events.”

“Mercurial’s branching model was very poor, and its sequentially numbered revision system was and remains a very bad design.”

“Mercurial was way easier to use and fit our use case but all the tooling was built for git.”

“Around 20 years ago Facebook made the same choice, so you're in good company in terms of technically sophisticated shops.”

“My rationale was that Mercurial was a lot safer and user-friendly compared to git.”

“I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and performance needed.”

“I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while.”

“Anyone who has ever used Mercurial knows very well what a good versioning tool UX looks like”

“Mercurial provides more value out of the box than git because it preserves branch info in commits”

“If you had started off with Mercurial, like I did, I am sure it would feel much smoother”

“For most project, "useful history" or "real history" is better than a "clean" history.”

“Mercurial has a strictly superior API. The issue is solely that OG Mercurial was written in Python.”

“Mercurial offered a more pleasant user interface, superior cross-platform support”

“hg sees history as useful metadata, and therefore you shouldn't dress it up artificially.”

“Mercurial was/is nice and imho smooths off a lot of the unnecessarily rough git edges.”

“the lack of real branching and the need to use DirState or Queues for selective commits made Mercurial feel too much like p4”

“You get the best of both worlds--a sane set of commands and a distributed version control system”

“There have been other VCS tools with arguably better UIs and feature sets than Git (Mercurial, Fossil)”