How do you consider the UX "nearly identical" or "arguably worse"?
The Mercurial CLI has clear, well named commands that are predictable and easy to memorize. hg histedit is clean and easy to use and visually shows you what is going to happen - what the new order will be - nondestructively.
The Git CLI requires you to understand its internal data structures to understand the difference between a rebase and a merge, and most people still can't explain it.
I've worked with Mercurial for 5+ years and no one on my team has ever given up on a client and done rm -rf to start anew. Every single git user I've talked to has done that multiple times.
> How do you consider the UX "nearly identical" or "arguably worse"?
The core concept is similar -- history is a stream of content-addressed commits. Concepts map almost 1:1. git does some things arguably better.
> hg histedit is clean and easy to use and visually shows you what is going to happen - what the new order will be - nondestructively.
hg histedit is basically identical to git rebase -i. The names are different, but the operations end up being more or less the same. hg amend -> git commit --amend. Graft -> cherry-pick.
> I've worked with Mercurial for 5+ years and no one on my team has ever given up on a client and done rm -rf to start anew. Every single git user I've talked to has done that multiple times.
I don't know what to tell you. I've also worked with Mercurial for 5+ years, but I've never rm -rf'd a git repo.
> history is a stream of content-addressed commits
Not quite true for mercurial. You also get stable identifiers for commits that remain the same even after being manipulated such as after rebases or amends. It also enables tracking the evolution of a changeset which then enables `hg evolve`.
Being content addressable isn’t a desirable feature in a user-friendly version control system. Who cares about it? Giving stable identifiers to commits is a much more needed feature.
Have you used Jujutsu before? It's git-backed and it sounds like it incorporates a lot of these niceties from Mercurial. I find it an awful lot more intuitive than Git to use and the stable identifiers are absolutely lovely to have.
You mean "git tag"?
If you tag every commit, sure. You don't know which commit has a bug that needs to be fixed in advance. And at the point you're tagging every commit, you're fighting git.
EDIT: reconsidering: you would have to move a tag when you make changes. A tag is just giving a name to a commit, not a stable identifier that follows a change. A branch is a more appropriate analogy.
A git-native workflow for this would be to have a sequence of branches you continue to update, where 'main' is those branches merged at all times.
git rebase -i drops you into a text editor where you have to manually copy, move, and edit lines, knowing what words mean what and manually type them each time.
hg histedit gives you a TUI which shows an interactive list and allows quick manipulation with the arrow keys and single characters for actions.
The two are as "equivalent" as i3 and KDE.
I don't know what version of hg you're using, but the histedit I've used drops me into an identical text editing setup as git rebase -i. It includes a summary of what the verbs mean in a comment at the bottom.
> The Git CLI requires you to understand its internal data structures to understand the difference between a rebase and a merge, and most people still can't explain it.
I don't know anything about mercurial, but is it really too much to ask of software engineers to understand a DAG (the only "internal data structure" in question)?
About rm -rf ing a repo, I'm sure if mercurial was more popular it would also suffer from the types of coders that would do such things on a regular basis.
> About rm -rf ing a repo, I'm sure if mercurial was more popular it would also suffer from the types of coders that would do such things on a regular basis.
Nope. You are simply flat-out wrong.
I have taught Mercurial to CEOs, secretaries, artists, craftsmen, etc. It just worked. They understood the mental model and happily used it to protect their stuff. The people I taught Mercurial to who worked with CNC machines in particular loved Mercurial as it protected them against changing some wonky setting in their CAD program that screwed everything up that they somehow couldn't figure out how to restore.
Git I can barely even explain to CS majors. The fact that AI has so much training data and is so very, very good at explaining how to undo strange Git states is all the evidence you need for just how abjectly terribly the Git UX is.
Jujutsu has proven that the underlying structure of Git is acceptable and that the issues really are all about the UX.
> Git I can barely even explain to CS majors.
Considering the number of kids that I've managed to understand git, I think this might be a teaching issue.
Well I can explain git to anybody who understands a DAG. And mercurial is also based on the exact same data structure. So yes it would be very surprising if you didn't consider it to be "acceptable".
The fact that there's lots of training data out there on strange git states is proof of exactly my point. Git is popular and thus used by lots of people who don't know the first thing about the command line, let alone data structures. Had mercurial won you'd see exactly the same types of errors commonly appearing.
Mercurial doesn't require understanding a DAG.
You can get by with `hg next`, `hg prev`, and `hg rebase -s <from> -d <to>` to move entire chains of commits around. Commands with obvious names that allow moving around without understanding chains of dependencies. No weird states where you checkout an old commit but random files from where you just were are left in the directory tree for you to deal with. No difference between `checkout`, `reset --soft`, and `reset --hard` to remember. No detached head states.
And no, `HEAD~1` is not a replacement for `prev`. One is a shortening of "previous", one requires you to remember a magic constant based on knowledge of the DAG.
As for `hg next`, the various responses here should show how clear, obvious, and intuitive the git UI is: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6759791/how-do-i-move-fo...
I disagree that Mercurial users can use `hg rebase -s ... -d ...` without understanding a DAG. The mechanism is only meaningful if you understand the structure of the commit graph.
> Well I can explain git to anybody who understands a DAG.
This. Right here. This is the difference.
I can explain Mercurial to people who don't want to understand a DAG.
For non-professional developers, the "merge machinery" is completely worthless.
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.
For the non-professional developer, the flow is "commit, commit, commit, commit, whoops--how many commits do I need to go back to fix things?, oh, 2, okay--revert, commit, commit, commit, commit, ...
At no point in their day are they facing "merge". And that makes all the difference.
If I spend a couple hours reading I can understand how git works, but I'm going to forget an hour later because it is so damn complicated with all the different details that my brain flushes it's cache to make room for something with less violently confusing edge cases.
For understanding git internals I went through "Git from the bottom up", a simple document with examples you type in, just to see what's going on. Many of those examples are raw git commands, nothing as sophisticated as "git commit". Easy to read, doesn't take long, but leaves behind an understanding that isn't maybe fully obvious at the time but makes everything much easier, forever. I've recommended that method to many coworkers and it seems to work well for most people. It doesn't need hours of reading either.