I wouldn’t personally go as far as saying you should use it. Using it, and it deserving love (and support) are all related but fundamentally different questions. I agree that Mercurial deserves love, I’m not sure if it actually deserves support (but because it deserves love, I am willing to entertain the possibility, and support the idea of supporting it). I don’t think anyone should use it as a primary tool, but it might be worth using out of love, and if people still love it, maybe that’s worth some support. I don’t know, I’m not anybody’s boss, I’m not telling anybody what to do, I’m just making suggestions.
Mercurial is frankly a lot nicer and more comfortable to actually work with, it has much better UX overall that fits into a much cleaner mental model with fewer exposed sharp edges you can cut yourself on, and can work pretty much transparently with git and can even use git as a backend in almost all cases. The downside is that like VHS vs. Beta, it is such a distant second place in popularity and adoption that it really has no realistic path forward, no matter how much better designed one could argue it is. Like @Holla@feddit.org suggested, the only thing better than being the actual best option, is being standardized, and git is basically completely and universally standardized at this point. And there are genuine benefits to that standardization, and there are genuine benefits to git itself too.
If you want to paper over git with some nice UX, Mercurial might be worth a shot, you might not like it at all… or you might love it, and it does deserve some love. But realistically, in a world where git is the standard, that isn’t going to reduce your cognitive load, it’s only going to add another layer of cognitive load. You have to love it to want that. And maybe you would love it. But git is not going away, even for those of us who love Mercurial, I think we have mostly all come to terms with the fact that git won the DVCS wars and that’s just the reality we live in now. Even having accepted that, I can still cheerfully sing Mercurial’s praises and wear my rose colored glasses when I look at it, despite not even using it anymore myself.
I gave up and converted all my personal hg repos to git and gitea (now forgejo) a couple years ago. It’s fine. I’m fluent in git now, I have to be for work, I can do powerful (sometimes dangerous and exciting) things with git and I wouldn’t give that up. I realistically probably speak git better than I speak hg nowadays, but like anyone who learned English as a second language and now uses it primarily, it is always a delight and a comfort to have any opportunity to return to the old mother tongue, no matter how briefly or simplistically, and hg still represents that delightful experience for me. Even when I start to forget native words and have to mix git phrases in that I can’t think of an hg equivalent for.
I wouldn’t personally go as far as saying you should use it. Using it, and it deserving love (and support) are all related but fundamentally different questions. I agree that Mercurial deserves love, I’m not sure if it actually deserves support (but because it deserves love, I am willing to entertain the possibility, and support the idea of supporting it). I don’t think anyone should use it as a primary tool, but it might be worth using out of love, and if people still love it, maybe that’s worth some support. I don’t know, I’m not anybody’s boss, I’m not telling anybody what to do, I’m just making suggestions.
Mercurial is frankly a lot nicer and more comfortable to actually work with, it has much better UX overall that fits into a much cleaner mental model with fewer exposed sharp edges you can cut yourself on, and can work pretty much transparently with git and can even use git as a backend in almost all cases. The downside is that like VHS vs. Beta, it is such a distant second place in popularity and adoption that it really has no realistic path forward, no matter how much better designed one could argue it is. Like @Holla@feddit.org suggested, the only thing better than being the actual best option, is being standardized, and git is basically completely and universally standardized at this point. And there are genuine benefits to that standardization, and there are genuine benefits to git itself too.
If you want to paper over git with some nice UX, Mercurial might be worth a shot, you might not like it at all… or you might love it, and it does deserve some love. But realistically, in a world where git is the standard, that isn’t going to reduce your cognitive load, it’s only going to add another layer of cognitive load. You have to love it to want that. And maybe you would love it. But git is not going away, even for those of us who love Mercurial, I think we have mostly all come to terms with the fact that git won the DVCS wars and that’s just the reality we live in now. Even having accepted that, I can still cheerfully sing Mercurial’s praises and wear my rose colored glasses when I look at it, despite not even using it anymore myself.
I gave up and converted all my personal hg repos to git and gitea (now forgejo) a couple years ago. It’s fine. I’m fluent in git now, I have to be for work, I can do powerful (sometimes dangerous and exciting) things with git and I wouldn’t give that up. I realistically probably speak git better than I speak hg nowadays, but like anyone who learned English as a second language and now uses it primarily, it is always a delight and a comfort to have any opportunity to return to the old mother tongue, no matter how briefly or simplistically, and hg still represents that delightful experience for me. Even when I start to forget native words and have to mix git phrases in that I can’t think of an hg equivalent for.