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by lucisferre 698 days ago
Yet another Mercurial-stan convinced of their "rightness" in the face of the overwhelming popularity of the alternative. Just blame "Github" and the "cool kids" for picking the "wrong thing".

I used Mercurial for a while when I was still also learning Git and migrating from SVN. It had serious UX problems and Git just "clicked" for me in a way that Mercurial just never did.

Perhaps I just wasn't smart enough to see the genius of Mercurial.

4 comments

I also just didn't really get on with mercurial. I think while the main flow was a bit more intuitive for those coming from SVN, the underlying model was quite complex and fussy. While Git has a pretty unintuitive and hard to remember UI, the underlying model is simple enough I can basically just go "I want to manipulate the graph like X" and then figure out which command actually does it (and there is always one available, even if it's not sensibly named). With mercurial the answer usually was "Well, what you should have done was enable this extension (or worse: one of two extensions, each of which has slightly different capabilities) and configure it like so, and then do these steps. What you've got now can't be changed".
> Yet another Mercurial-stan convinced of their "rightness" in the face of the overwhelming popularity of the alternative.

It follows then that Windows® is a much better desktop/laptop OS (than Linux or macOS), given its popularity.

> Yet another Mercurial-stan convinced of their "rightness" in the face of the overwhelming popularity of the alternative. Just blame "Github" and the "cool kids" for picking the "wrong thing".

Any time someone complains about popularity and tries to sell rewrites in Rust as a solution to attract more users, you know right there and then what kind of delusion you're dealing with.

That was really the worst part of the post. Just the total lack of self awareness. "Look it is clearly the best tool, all we have to do is rebuild it completely from the ground up."
Preferring git because mercurial had serious UX problems is like picking C because Python makes it easy to have memory leaks.
That is a valid reason to pick Python.
You read that wrong I think