Chapter 11. Customizing the Output of Mercurial

Mercurial provides a powerful mechanism to let you control how it displays information. The mechanism is based on templates. You can use templates to generate specific output for a single command, or to customize the entire appearance of the built-in web interface.

Using Precanned Output Styles

Packaged with Mercurial are some output styles that you can use immediately. A style is simply a precanned template that someone wrote and installed somewhere that Mercurial can find.

Before we take a look at Mercurial’s bundled styles, let’s review its normal output.

$ hg log -r1
changeset:   1:59ae2fd35d8a
tag:         mytag
user:        Bryan O'Sullivan <bos@serpentine.com>
date:        Tue May 05 06:44:45 2009 +0000
summary:     added line to end of <<hello>> file.

This is somewhat informative, but it takes up a lot of space—five lines of output per changeset. The compact style reduces this to three lines, presented in a sparse manner.

$ hg log --style compact
3[tip]   4b984b80759d   2009-05-05 06:44 +0000   bos
  Added tag v0.1 for changeset cefd14841d41

2[v0.1]   cefd14841d41   2009-05-05 06:44 +0000   bos
  Added tag mytag for changeset 59ae2fd35d8a

1[mytag]   59ae2fd35d8a   2009-05-05 06:44 +0000   bos
  added line to end of <<hello>> file.

0   6ed500684dd0   2009-05-05 06:44 +0000   bos
  added hello

The changelog style hints at the expressive power of Mercurial’s templating engine. This style attempts to follow the GNU Project’s changelog guidelines.

$ hg log --style changelog 2009-05-05 Bryan O'Sullivan ...

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