About Mercurial

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.

Distributed architecture

Traditional version control systems such as Subversion are typical client-server architectures with a central server to store the revisions of a project. In contrast, Mercurial is truly distributed, giving each developer a local copy of the entire development history. This way it works independent of network access or a central server. Committing, branching and merging are fast and cheap.

Fast

Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds. Therefore Mercurial is perfectly suitable for large projects such as nginx (hg) or NetBeans (hg).

Platform independent

Mercurial was written with platform independence in mind. Therefore most of Mercurial is written in Python, with a small part in portable C for performance reasons. As a result, binary releases are available on all major platforms.

Extensible

The functionality of Mercurial can be increased with extensions, either by activating the official ones which are shipped with Mercurial or downloading some from the wiki or by writing your own. Extensions are written in Python and can change the workings of the basic commands, add new commands and access all the core functions of Mercurial.

Easy to use

Mercurial sports a consistent command set in which most subversion users feel right at home. Potentially dangerous actions are available via extensions you need to enable, so the basic interface is easy to use, easy to learn and hard to break. The Quick Start should get you going in a just few minutes.

Open Source

Mercurial is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2 or any later version.