55 engineers on Hacker News describe using Mercurial first-hand: 16 endorse it, 13 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“We actually preferred it, but we knew at that point that "everyone" used Git, and we would never be seen as serious”
endorse · production · jedberg · 2026-05-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Mercurial was a tiny bit better but not that much better that it'd compensate for the entire ecosystem”
endorse · production · TacticalCoder · 2026-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Then on my next team, we used mercurial. I really, really, really liked mercurial, both as a developer and as a dev infrastructure administrator.”
endorse · production · hoistbypetard · 2024-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Mercurial was cool, but lacking support meant little things like Jenkins having to pull 3x instead of 1x for git natively”
regret · production · vasco · 2024-01-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“git is way better at being a DVCS than Mercurial. ... encoding branch data in the commit itself”
regret · production · devman0 · 2023-01-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“From a developer stand point the experience was better but all the tooling and integrations are git based so we switched.”
endorse · production · tempest_ · 2022-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Mercurial is built on what is almost the same model and has what I think is a better UI/UX.”
endorse · production · GuB-42 · 2022-06-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I regret the loss of Mercurial, after having used it for a decade or so”
endorse · personal · 10 yr · sieve · 2021-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The one thing that turned me off on mercurial was that branching information was stored as part of the commit.”
regret · production · bb88 · 2020-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'd much much rather use Mercurial with Evolve extension - that is really good.”
endorse · production · hvidgaard · 2020-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm still using Mercurial, and I don't regret that decision.”
endorse · personal · mcherm · 2020-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched shortly after. I can count on one hand how many times I've had to intervene in the last few years.”
endorse · production · hvidgaard · 2020-01-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Mercurial has always been the one I struggled the most with. It never clicked with me.”
regret · production · ldng · 2019-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We rolled out Mercurial for a few projects and it just clicked for the guys”
endorse · production · hvidgaard · 2018-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to git after a few weeks since the repository was constantly broken”
regret · personal · bipson · 2018-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Switched to mercurial from svn and workflow was painless for the team.”
endorse · production · 1 yr · prepend · 2018-04-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for me it's too late... I mean Mercurial's awful heavy-weight branching model”
regret · personal · cryptonector · 2017-05-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I found it much easier to switch to hg. Once I had been using hg for a while, I found that I had absorbed enough of the difficult/confusing stuff”
endorse · personal · bblough · 2016-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For simple workflows (and certainly for beginners), hg is far easier to use than git. However when it comes to advanced usage”
mixed · personal · daigoba66 · 2016-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we put a huge amount of work into switching from Mercurial to Git”
regret · production · williamstein · 2016-09-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“yes we are still on mercurial (and yes we still love it)”
endorse · production · agentgt · 2016-09-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At my workplace we tried signed hg commits for a little over a year. ... it was a lot of work for largely hypothetical benefits.”
regret · production · 1 yr · michaelt · 2016-04-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“From time to time bookmarks wouldn't update remotely. This made me always push twice”
regret · production · Skinney · 2015-05-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We turned on largefiles extension almost a year ago and have come to regret that decision.”
regret · production · 1 yr · neandrake · 2015-04-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's a nightmare doing my development model in an SCM where I can't toss commits around willy-nilly like I can in Git.”
regret · production · coldpie · 2014-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It is extremely easy, and if that doesnt work you just kill that branch and you don't worry about anything.”
endorse · production · stevoo · 2013-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“preregistering each server using plink before trying to connect to it using the hg client... mystery delays/authorisation problems we've observed”
mixed · production · Silhouette · 2013-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we'd been bitten by Mercurial's poor handling of large binary files”
regret · production · 1 yr · ewood · 2012-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A tool like Mercurial proves that DVCS systems do not have to have a confusing CLI... Too bad the Mercurial back-end is so slow.”
mixed · personal · w0utert · 2012-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was a big mercurial fan pre-hiring.”
endorse · personal · SoftwareMaven · 2012-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from SVN to Mercurial around 6 months ago and I have to say I am annoyed that I have to spend so much time messing around with the tool”
regret · production · 0.5 yr · MetaMan · 2011-09-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Mercurial here. Easy, secure (ssh with keys) never forget files, small transfer size”
endorse · production · hlidotbe · 2010-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In 2010 or so we tried to adopt Mercurial at the small company I worked at, but the support for Git was just so much better”
neutral · production · marklar423 · 2025-08-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used Mercurial for many years when I worked at a company that used because they used BitBucket”
neutral · production · happymellon · 2023-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to Git at time of Mercurial 2.1 (I said it was long time ago)”
neutral · production · Miiko · 2022-04-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We did that when we migrated from cvs to mercurial.”
neutral · production · fredrik-j · 2020-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our main repository is a relatively big Mercurial repository.”
neutral · production · __mp · 2018-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We had teams using SVN and teams using HG. Phab supports them all.”
neutral · production · maktouch · 2018-06-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“took out my employer's upstream Mercurial server for several days straight”
neutral · production · bunderbunder · 2018-01-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have a bunch of projects that are stored in a mercurial repo”
neutral · personal · welly · 2017-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using Bitbucket and Mercurial for all side projects of mine for quite a while.”
neutral · personal · zubspace · 2017-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If your team treats Git the way we used to use Mercurial, where each developer will merge their changes into master”
neutral · production · gknoy · 2015-09-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If you prefer the Mercurial interface, I highly recommend trying out hg-git.”
neutral · production · 3 yr · merijnv · 2014-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haxe, git, mercurial, FlashDevelop, Java, etc...”
neutral · production · Mikeb85 · 2014-01-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it also requires a substantial rewrite of the hg codebase, since we use strings everywhere.”
neutral · production · jordigh · 2013-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our own hosted git and hg”
neutral · production · sklivvz1971 · 2013-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use linux for: redis, elasticsearch, HAProxy, DNS (bind), nginx, mail (exim) apache, wordpress, mysql, nexpose, backups, puppet, asterix, android builds and our internal mercurial.”
neutral · production · Nick-Craver · 2013-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“i was perfectly fine with self-hosted mercurial, but customers are more important than my taste”
neutral · production · rdeioris · 2013-06-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“moved to mercurial+JIRA, have Eclipse on more workstations than visual studio”
neutral · production · meaty · 2012-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use subversion, git and mercurial internally.”
neutral · production · mrmekon · 2011-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I went to HG but then gave Git another attempt because I didn't like feeling defeated.”
neutral · personal · vyrotek · 2011-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“On top of those, we use Apache, mod_wsgi, Fabric (in a slightly-weird way which I'll get into below), mod_xsendfile, Mercurial”
neutral · production · rcoder · 2010-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Initially we used it with mercurial. But later on we moved to fossil as it's a more natural fit.”
neutral · production · cydork · 2010-09-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At Astrails we used mercurial for a couple of years with quite an elaborate workflow”
neutral · production · 2 yr · Vitaly · 2010-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?