1) tfs: shelves are named and can be worked with independently; git: stashes are numbered in a sort of a stack and only the top stash is unpacked and deleted destroying your data, infuriating, also local edits are moved into the stash, not copied.
2) tfs: branches are mapped to different folders and can be worked on simultaneously; git: branches are mapped to single folder and switching branches deletes local edits.
3) tfs: pulling from server merges new text preserving local changes; git: pull and checkout deletes local changes.
4) tfs: can't commit unresolved merge conflicts; git: commits just fine, it's also not obvious if you have merge conflicts to commit or not.
5) tfs: handles concurrent edits as merge conflicts and handles them as they occur; git: you create feature branches and in case of concurrent branches you have merge conflicts when you merge to master, then you have p.4. Feature branches are advertised as a big fat killer feature of git, but I don't quite see the win here, you still have merge conflicts.
6) tfs: all commits in a branch are visible, it's not obvious how to delete them, you can only create rollback commits; git: if something happens to the branch label, the commits are gone.
I want my VCS to be quiet, out of sight and do as it's told, because my main focus should be programming, not how to tame a tool that's supposed to save text. The fact that you have to "learn git", and that there are so many StackOverflow git question on how to do (what should be) trivial operations is probably a hint that things aren't great in the usability department.
For hg, I just read an introductory guide (I think it was Joel Spolski's one) and that was enough. I used to be able to do a more in-depth comparison and criticism but nowadays I use git and try not to think about it too much.
The entire CLI is badly designed, with highly non-orthogonal commands interacting in unexpected ways. Recent versions of git has started introducing commands with a more top-down design (e.g. git switch), but that's a very novel development
Git also diverged significantly from the SVN command line, but instead of following the tasteful Darcs path of making commands clearer and cleaner it commonly:
- reused the same terms for different operations, usually less intuitive ones (e.g. the absolutely awful "git revert")
- removed clear commands to confusingly tack them onto others (e.g. "git add" to resolve commits)\
On that front, mercurial extended the existing commands-set much more cleanly and clearly.
Mercurial's CLI felt like an improved extension of SVN's, Darcs felt like a drastically different take with plenty for it, Git's felt like one of those ransom letters cut out of newspapers, full of jangly bits which make little sense, and concepts which worked fine altered for no perceivable reason.
Users that started with Git are more likely to internalize Git's concepts as "the natural way to do version control", and more likely to find Mercurial counterintuitive.
But where mercurial shines with a clean, consistent and simple UX, git is a mess where storage-layer abstractions leak to the user and where single commands serve multiple unrelated purposes.
To give you a practical example, any command that takes commit(s) as argument (for checking-out, logging, rebasing, …) would be passed a `revset` in mercurial-land. Revsets are a simple DSL to address commits (by hash, lineage, topology, distance, …), which makes new commands easy to learn, and renders one third of `git help log` inadequate. Most commands that output something use templates as argument, which renders another half of `git help log` laughable.
There is nothing "natural" about the git UX, you've got to accept that it grew organically with no attention to details.
All this to say, I love git, and as a versioning system, it seems obvious to me that we can do better than git for 90% of workflows. Just yesterday I was surprised by how `git push --tags` worked and had to read the man page for `git-push` to see I wanted `git push --follow-tags`. Just reading this forum today I see that I alternately probably(?) could have figured out what I wanted with `git help push` which I didn’t even really realize was a thing.
But do I want to use an easier versioning system? I’m not sure. git has a kind of forcing function for a growth mindset. I value it for its creative expressivity.
Edit for sibling comment: Stockholm Syndrome, quite possibly. But as the “victim,” I still love git!
I'm not saying mercurial is better, but there's a reason I have to remind people that this[1] is satire - the real manuals are so convoluted that they seem like parodies of themselves.
[1] https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/#c2NyZWVuJCRnYXJ...
I feel like the Mercurial fanbase is just another loud fanbase. I did start with CVS and SVN and git was absolutely fantastic when I started using it. On the other hand I could never get the hang of Mercurial. From MY PERSONAL perspective it has a terrible UX(which is the exact opposite experience of the loud hg fan git critics on HN). I absolutely cannot relate to the people who say that Mercurial has the better UX, but I don't remember myself constantly bashing mercurial either like the other side does. From my perspective `git add -p` is an important essential functionality that hg does not provide. I believe there was some sort of plugin but it was no where near as polished.
Yes, there are a handful of nice features in mercurial, but none which are actually necessarily needed inside of the git core.
I do faintly remember that my biggest problem with git was understanding that a commit doesn't push automatically. But then again that's just a difference between a DVCS and whatever was there before.
Mercurial has an interactive commit mode (hg ci -i) with a slick TUI for navigating and selecting chunks to commit.
