Mercurial/Tips And Tricks

Please add your favorite Mercurial tip here:

Other Mercurial Topics

• see Setting up Mercurial
• see Migrating existing CVS or SVN based child workspaces to Mercurial
• see Using Mercurial with OpenOffice.org: getting started
• see Using Mercurial with OpenOffice.org: working with child workspaces

Tips and Tricks

• After pulling/merging:
  • "hg log --follow-first" is a convenient way to display your CWS changes at the top of the log.
  • "hg log --follow-first -P <original_clone_milestone>" will show only the CWS changesets.
  • "hg outgoing" works as well, of course.
• Combined diff which contains exactly the changes of your CWS without anything pulled from master
  • If your current milestone tag is locally available: hg diff -r <current_milestone_tag>
  • If your current milestone tag is *not* locally available (might happen, see above):
    • search for your last pull/merge from the master with "hg log -m"
    • "hg diff -r <second_parent_of_last_master_merge>"
  • Alternatively, if you just did a pull/merge from master: "hg export --switch-parent tip"
• The default output format of some commands does not suit you? Use styles:
  • "hg log --style=compact"
  • "hg outgoing --style=changelog"
• Or create your own format with the template engine:
  • "hg outgoing --template '{date|shortdate} {author|person} {desc}\n' --newest-first"
• Accessing repository over ssh using Tortoise Hg on Windows
  • If you want to use the ssh client of your Cygwin shell (and also ssh-agent), add the following to the [ui] section of your mercurial.ini: ssh = ssh

Mercurial on Windows/cygwin

Depending on the cygwin version, using cygwins hg (and other tools) sometimes fails. TortoiseHg (http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/wiki/Home) can be used as alternative.

To get rid of cygwin's hg rename /usr/bin/hg.

You can decide which ssl support you use in the cygwin shell. If you want to use the ssh-agent then you have to specify the following line in the [ui] section of ~/.hgrc: ssh = <Windows path to cygwin>\bin\ssh.exe

For the graphical interface of TortoiseHg Putty's pageant is the default ssh key provider. TortoiseHg allows easy graphical access to hg repositories within the Windows Explorer.