Mercurial is one of the distributed version control system available today.If you are not aware of what a distributed version control is refer to this. The most commonly used Micrsoft Windows uses it. It is also used in developing various other linux distributions including FreeBSD and even macOS.
Mercurial is available for all platforms. To download it visit their official download page. It provides all the necessary information and guide for download and installion.
The best resource to learn is the official guide. It will take you as a noob and will you make you pro.
- design goals include high performance and scalability,
- robust handling of both plain text and binary files
- advanced branching and merging capabilities
- easy transition from earlier version control e.g SVN
Mercurial is available both in command line and as well graphical user interface.For GUI you need to download various extensions.TortoiseHg is one of the popularly used extensions while there are many others IDE as well.
- git stores commits using an commit hash while mercurial does maintain only logs appended in the disk thus the unique commit hash in git being immutable results in a cleaner history.
- git provides more safety feature to prevent destructive actions when one tries to rewrite history.
- With git it is easier to go back to earlier commits and do relevant changes than mercurial.
- Branching in git is much better and killer feature as we don't need to clone the repo again for each new branch as in case of mercurial.
- No staging area in mercurial although the feature is available in the form of extensions but it is not fully fledged like that of git and lot more...
For more informaiton you can visit this page
- Mercurial Extensions - https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/UsingExtensions
- Mercurial Tutorial - https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/Tutorial