Mercurial

Mercurial (commonly referred to as hg) is a distributed version control system written in Python and is similar in many ways to Git, Bazaar and Darcs.

Installation

Install the mercurial package. For the development version, install mercurial-hg^AUR.

Graphical front-ends

EasyMercurial — Simple user interface for the Mercurial distributed version control system.

https://easyhg.org/ || easyhg^AUR

hgk — Tcl/Tk based tool to browse the history of a repository in a graphical way.

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/HgkExtension || mercurial + tk

hgview — Qt5 and text based Mercurial log navigator.

https://www.logilab.org/project/hgview/^{[dead link 2022-09-22 ⓘ]} || hgview^AUR

TortoiseHg — Set of graphical tools and a Nautilus extension for the Mercurial distributed revision control system.

https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/ || tortoisehg^AUR

Configuration

At the minimum you should configure your username or mercurial will most likely give you an error when trying to commit. Do this by editing ~/.hgrc and adding the following:

~/.hgrc

[ui]
username = John Smith <johnsmith@domain.tld>

To use the graphical browser hgk aka. hg view, add the following to ~/.hgrc (see forum thread):

~/.hgrc

[extensions]
hgk=

You will need to install tk before running hg view to avoid the rather cryptic error message:

/usr/bin/env: wish: No such file or directory

To remove Mercurial warnings of unverified certificate fingerprints, add the following to ~/.hgrc (see Mercurial wiki):

If you are going to be working with large repositories, you may want to enable the progress extension by adding it to your ~/.hgrc file:

This will show progress bars on longer operations after 3 seconds. If you would like the progress bar to show sooner, you can append the following to your configuration file:

Usage

All mercurial commands are initiated with the hg prefix. To see a list of some of the common commands, run

$ hg help

You can either work with a pre-existing repository (collection of code or files), or create your own to share.

To work with a pre-existing repository, you must clone it to a directory of your choice:

$ mkdir mercurial
$ cd mercurial
$ hg clone http://hg.serpentine.com/tutorial/dead+link+2020-03-30 ⓘ

To create you own, change to the directory you wish to share and initiate a mercurial project

$ cd myfiles
$ hg init myfiles

Dotfiles Repository

If you intend on creating a repository of all your files, you simply initiate the project in your home folder:

$ hg init

It is then just a case of adding the specific files you wish to track:

$ hg add |file1 file2 file3

You can then create a to ensure that only the files you wish to include in the repository are tracked by mercurial.