Mercurial vs Git - Difference and Comparison

Git and Mercurial are both free software tools for distributed revision control and software source code management.

Both Git and Mercurial were started at approximately the same time with similar aims. The immediate stimulus was the announcement in April 2005 by Bitmover that they were withdrawing the free version of BitKeeper, which had been used for the version control requirements of the Linux kernel project. Mercurial creator Matt Mackall decided to write a distributed version control system as a replacement for use with the Linux kernel. Mackall first announced Mercurial on April 19, 2005.

Git was created by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development, with an emphasis on being fast. The development of Git began on April 3, 2005. The project was announced on April 6, and became self-hosting as of April 7. The first merge of multiple branches was done on April 18.

The Linux kernel project decided to use Git rather than Mercurial, but Mercurial is now used by many other projects.

Comparison chart

Differences — Similarities —

Git versus Mercurial comparison chart

	Git	Mercurial
	current rating is 3.95/5 1 2 3 4 5 (110 ratings)	current rating is 4.15/5 1 2 3 4 5 (110 ratings)
Built-in web server	No	Yes
Pre/post-event hooks	Yes	Yes
End of line conversions	Yes	Yes
Tags	Yes	Yes
International support	Partial	Yes
File renames	Yes (implicit)	Yes
Merge file renames	Yes	Yes
Symbolic links	Yes	Yes
Open source	Yes	Yes
Signed Revisions	Yes	Yes
Revision IDs	SHA-1 hashes	Numbers, SHA-1 hashes
Atomic commits	Yes	Yes
History model	Snapshot	Changeset
Repository size	O(patch) (Big O notation)	O(patch) (Big O notation)
Concurrency model	Merge	Merge
Operating Systems	Unix-like, Windows, Mac OS X	Unix-like, Windows, Mac OS X
Staging area	Yes	No
Externals branch	Yes	No
Cost	Free	Free
RCS Keyword	Yes, but not recommended	via bundled plugin
Shallow checkout / clone	Yes	Bugzilla extension
File/dir name tracking	Rename detection	Rename tracking
Subdirectory checkout/clone	No	No
Repository model	Distributed	Distributed
Permission keeping	Execution bit only	Execution bit only
Network protocols	custom, custom over ssh, rsync, HTTP, email bundles	HTTP, custom over ssh, email bundles (with standard plugin)
Developed by	Junio Hamano, Linus Torvalds	Matt Mackall
Maintained by	Junio Hamano	Matt Mackall
Written in	C, Bourne Shell, Perl	Python and C
Merge tracking	Yes	Yes
Bug Tracker integration	No	Trac (via plugin)
License	GPL v2	GPL v2
Website	git-scm.com	www.selenic.com/mercurial
OS	POSIX, worse Windows support	Unix-like, Windows, Mac OS X
Introduction (from Wikipedia)	Git is a free distributed revision control, or software source code management project with an emphasis on being fast. Git was initially created by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development.	Mercurial is a cross-platform, distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is mainly implemented using the Python programming language, but includes a binary diff implementation written in C.
Type	Revision control	Revision control

Design goals

Mercurial's major design goals include high performance, scalability, being a serverless, fully distributed collaborative development, robust handling of both plain text and binary files, and advanced branching and merging capabilities, while remaining conceptually simple. It includes an integrated web interface.

One of Linus Torvalds' key design goals for Git was speed and efficiency of operations. Other design criteria included strong safeguards against corruption, either accidental or malicious.

Projects using Git vs Projects using Mercurial

Several high-profile software projects now use Git for revision control, most notably the Linux kernel, Perl, Samba, X.org Server, Qt (toolkit), One Laptop per Child (OLPC) core development, Ruby on Rails web framework, VLC, YUI, Merb, Wine, SWI Prolog, GNOME, GStreamer, DragonFly BSD and the Android mobile platform.

Projects using Mercurial include Adblock Plus, Aldrin, Audacious, Dovecot IMAP server, GNU Octave, NxOS, Nuxeo, Growl, MoinMoin wiki software, Mozilla, Mutt (email client), Netbeans (IDE), OpenJDK, Python, SAGE, Sun Microsystem's OpenSolaris and Oracle's Opensource Software like Btrfs.

Git vs Mercurial Portability

Mercurial was initially written to run on Linux. It has been ported to Windows, Mac OS X, and most other Unix-like systems. Mercurial is primarily a command line program.

Git is primarily developed on Linux, but can be used on other Unix-like operating systems including BSD and Solaris.

Git also runs on Windows. There are two variants:

A native Microsoft Windows port, called msysgit is approaching completion. As of February 2009, there are downloadable installers ready for testing Some commands are not yet available from the GUIs, and must be invoked from the command line.
Git also runs on top of Cygwin (a POSIX emulation layer), although it is noticeably slower, especially for commands written as shell scripts.

User Interface for Git vs Mercurial

All of Mercurial's operations are invoked as keyword options to its driver program hg, a reference to the chemical symbol of the element mercury. GUI interfaces for Mercurial include Hgk (Tcl/Tk). This is implemented as a Mercurial extension, and is part of the official version. This viewer displays the directed acyclic graph of the changesets of a Mercurial repository. This viewer can be invoked via the command 'hg view', if the extension is enabled. hgk was originally based on a similar tool for git called gitk. There is hgk replacement named hgview that is written in pure python and provides both gtk and qt interfaces.

Related Mercurial tools include:

Related tools for merging include (h)gct (Qt) and Meld.
The convert extension allows import from CVS, Darcs, git, GNU Arch, Monotone and Subversion repositories.
Netbeans IDE supports Mercurial from Version 6.
Tortoise Hg provides a Windows user-friendly, right-click menu interface.
VisualHG is an Mercurial source control provider plugin for MS Visual Studio 2008.
Mercurial Eclipse is an Eclipse team provider plugin for Eclipse 3.3 and newer.

Alternatives for running Git using a GUI include:

git-cvsserver (which emulates a CVS server, allowing use of Windows CVS clients)
Eclipse IDE-based Git client, based on a pure Java implementation of Git's internals: egit
NetBeans IDE support for Git is under development.
A Windows Explorer extension (a TortoiseCVS/TortoiseSVN-lookalike) was started at TortoiseGit and Git Extensions which is an explorer extension as well as a standalone GUI and a Visual Studio 2008 Plug-in