Mercurial has a unique set of properties that make it a particularly good choice as a revision control system:
If you are at all familiar with revision control systems, you should be able to get up and running with Mercurial in less than five minutes. Even if not, it will take no more than a few minutes longer. Mercurial’s command and feature sets are generally uniform and consistent, so you can keep track of a few general rules instead of a host of exceptions.
On a small project, you can start working with Mercurial in moments. Creating new changes and branches, transferring changes around (whether locally or over a network), and history and status operations are all fast. Mercurial attempts to stay nimble and largely out of your way by combining low cognitive overhead with blazingly fast operations.
The usefulness of Mercurial is not limited to small projects: it is used by projects with hundreds to thousands of contributors, each containing tens of thousands of files and hundreds of megabytes of source code.
If the core functionality of Mercurial is not enough for you, it’s easy to build on. Mercurial is well suited to scripting tasks, and its clean internals and implementation in Python make it easy to add features in the form of extensions. There are a number of popular and useful extensions already available, ranging from helping to identify bugs to improving performance.
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