[cmrdporcupine]

Git functionality is great. But the CLI just kind of grew in a nonsensical way. No serious effort seems to have been made on UX consistency and verb/noun names.

People who've been using it for years don't notice, they don't even think about it. But when coming from scratch, it's anything but intuitive. The CLI is not discoverable in a reasonable way.

That and there's so many ways to use it.

Mercurial had the advantage of having a much more consistent UX. Though these days I'm sure I'd struggle with it, because I'm so used to git.

Mercurial was never trying to "replace" git. All of these guys came out at the same time. Git got headspace because Linux used it and GitHub was a "cool" Ruby on Rails site, run by cool web 2.0 kids, same era as the rise of Twitter, etc. (And also down all the time, just like Twitter).

[bigstrat2003]

Exactly this. To be perfectly honest, the git CLI is so bad that I would take pretty much anything over git. I would prefer SVN over git, despite that product being older and with less functionality, just because it's at least easy to use.

I learned and use git because that's just how the industry has moved, and I'm pragmatic enough to just roll with it. But good Lord, the UI is a case study in "programmers shouldn't be allowed to design UIs".

[bvrmn]

> I would prefer SVN over git

Yes SVN has so much better CLI especially for things like

  * merging

  * history navigation

  * searching commit messages, filenames and file content

  * bisecting

I'm filled with joy remembering good old SVN days and how my life was a way easier.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah, SVN was terrible. Its chief advantage was it was just less terrible than CVS and carried roughly the same workflow, so wasn't unfamiliar to people. It was basically CVS with atomic commits and a better interface and transport layer. You could drop SVN into a CVS shop without ruffling many feathers -- and back then I found most people were quite resistant to "novelty" in revision control systems, so SVN fit into that.

I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with a centralized revision control system. I used Piper/CitC at Google for years and it could be ... tolerable. Many people just end up using git this way anyways.

But SVN shipped with garbage merge-on-merge support, and that was the deal-breaker for me.

[WorldMaker]

> Mercurial was never trying to "replace" git. All of these guys came out at the same time.

Mercurial even had a couple weeks' head start on git, and git partly happened trying to replace Mercurial in early experimentation. The name "git" was always an interesting self-deprecating choice because it was (intentionally) "stupider" than its competition that it knew about, which included Mercurial (and also darcs/Monotone/Bazaar).

[cmrdporcupine]

It's a bummer that Graydon didn't stick with monotone.

[mkesper]

Please have a look at newer commands like restore, switch etc. Much clearer in my regard.