Mercurial Free Version Control Software
Python Based Self-Hosted Distributed Version Control System
Manage code for projects of any size and type with one of the most popular free and open source cross-platform distributed version control software.
Mercurial
Overview
Mercurial is an excellent free and open source distributed version control software like Git. Mercurial is quick, scalable and handles projects of all sizes effectively. Further, it is very simpler than Git that may attracts developer to use it. Moreover, a wide variety of workflows are supported by Mercurial and you can easily enhance its functionality with extensions.
Mercurial is fast and performs most of the actions locally. It allows developers to easily generate diffs between revisions and switch in minutes. Therefore, it is perfectly suitable for large projects such as Nginx, NetBeans, and many more. Mercurial has powerful branching model, developers can easily create and merge branches.
Mercurial is largely written in Python, although some portion was in created C language created due to performance. It is cross-platform and binary releases are available for all major platforms. Mercurial is also extensible that means that developers can activate existing extensions to enhance functionality. However, it allows to write own extensions as per business requirements.
System Requirements
Mercurial does not has any unique criteria for installation. Please check the installation section.
Features
Mercurial is shipped with powerful features of version control software. Some of the key features are listed below:
- Distributed architecture
- Fast
- Platform independent
- Extensible
- Easy to use
- Open Source
- High performance and scalability
- Branching and merging
- Supports plain text and binary files
Installation
Installing on Windows
Download the latest version of TortoiseHg from http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/download/windows.html.
Run installer and follow wizard.
Installing on Ubuntu
Run below commands.
$ apt-get install mercurial
Installing on Fedora
Run command to install it on Fedora.
$ dnf install mercurial
Installing on MacOS
Run command to install it on MacOS.
$ brew install mercurial
Installing on MacOS
Run following commands to install it on FreeBSD.
$ cd /usr/ports/devel/mercurial
$ make install
