This is why I'm in love with Mercurial. It has a very simple mental model which is not far from Git, but Mercurial's commands and presentation are so much more comprehensible.
Every time I see a thread like this I echo the same sentiments. It’s not hard to grok how hg works, git adds more mental cycles which just take away from solving the actual problem at hand
I want to pile on here; I switched to Mercurial for some projects and didn't think much of it (had to look up equivalents of some git commands here and there). However, after 2 years of that, coming back to git made me feel like a total newbie. I recently got myself into a detached HEAD state and felt like I was groping in the dark with "git reset". I never had this issue with mercurial, even with weird botched evolve/content-divergent states.
Issues with mercurial like that just throw python stack traces at you and say good luck. mercurial isn't good enough to be special from everyone else using git. it's like using your own keyboard layout, of course you can. but there's a cost for not really a good reason.
I used Mercurial at work for over 5 years and never once had a stack trace.
The fact you mention it in reaction to a Git detached HEAD suggests you think that is an error condition / bug in Git. Although I hate Git, I know it well enough to know that a detached HEAD is not a bug and it can even be useful sometimes. Or maybe you're referring to half-finished rebases - those exist in Git too. If you did think these are bugs in Git then I think that proves how confusing Git is!
Git won over Mercurial because (1) it was released before Mercurial (by a fairly short margin), (2) it was written by Linus and that's a level of celebrity to devs that is hard to beat, and (3) it's the basis of GitHub (partly because of 1 and 2). If the top open source hosting service were HgHub, or Git had been written by some other developer, things could well be different. (But now that we're in this situation, I agree it's better to use Git like everyone else even though it's an inferior tool.)
> Heptapod is a community driven effort to bring Mercurial SCM support to GitLab™, started by Octobus, a company providing professional services around Mercurial.
