Mercurial - the VCS I wish had won back in 2005

Distributed VCS

After I tasted of DVCS with GNU Arch I could not go back to centralised ones and choose Mercurial over Git for its simplicity of User Interface (UI).

Mercurial has all characteristics you can find in other DVCS :

No canonical, reference copy of the codebase exists by default; only working copies.
Common operations (such as commits, viewing history, and reverting changes) are fast, because there is no need to communicate with a central server. Rather, communication is only necessary when pushing or pulling changes to or from other peers.
Each working copy effectively functions as a remote backup of the codebase and of its change-history, providing natural protection against data loss.

In addition to these, it has a long list of extensions, some of them bundled with it and some other available on the Net. These are the ones I use regularly:

Name	Purpose
`color`	Colorize Hg’s output
`convert`	Conversion between different VCS
`fetch`	Implement the pull + merge action in one command
`graphlog`	Show in ASCII art the parallel flows with merges
`hgflow`	Implements the Hg equivalent of Git flow
`hgshelve`	With that one can put aside the current modifications to a given file and get them back later
`keyword`	Enable the different `$keywords`
`mq`	Mercurial Queues, a way to manipulate stacks of patches and version them
`patchbomb`	Enable sending changesets by email
`rebase`	Implements the `rebase` command

Mercurial hosting

Mercurial used to have Bitbucket as an equivalent to GitHub. They have since stopped supporting Mercurial completely, so I stopped using them.

NOTE: Jujutsu is a new, git-compatible VCS that I started using recently. It has the cleanliness of Mercurial while being better and faster.