Re: preferring mercurial

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't understand the git momentum.  I've use hg heavily, and am generally
> happy with it.

I use git heavily, and am happy with it. Except that I wish gitk and
git gui were more keyboard-friendly.

> Every time I have to use git, I have a terrible time.  I find it vastly more
> complicated than hg.  The docs (in the form of man pages) I find never answer my
> questions.  Each one seems to cover 100 different topics, variations and corner
> cases.  Trying to read this requires a vast new vocabulary or arcane terms.

If you want answers, read “Pro Git”, not manuals. Manuals are for when
you know what you want, just forgot some little detail.

> hg also has tortoisehg, which is a very nice mature gui.  There is nothing like
> that for git.  I have found 1 or 2 guis that are extremely limited in function.

All Tortoise-like GUIs I have seen have a fatal flaw. They start
visualizing from the space dimension (files in the tree), then you can
dig down through the context menus to the time dimension (commits in
the DAG) and the alternate-reality dimension (branches).

Gitk (and a few less featureful lookalikes, git cola, giggle) start
with the DAG, and then you can select a commit and see which files it
touches. And this helps with the big picture immensely.