Power User Tools

Hints for would-be power users

1. Built-in features

• revsets - our powerful revision query language

• filesets - our similarly powerful file query language

• templating - the templater used by log and hgweb

• Aliases - built-in command substitution

2. Under-appreciated commands

• log -G - graph view of commits

• log -k - keyword search in commits

• help -k - keyword search in help

• commit --amend - amend the last commit

• status --change - status output for a change

• status --rev a:b - status between two changes

• grep - search all of history for regular expressions

• import URL - import patch(es) from a URL

3. Automation

• Hooks - execute code for specific Mercurial events or commands

• HGPLAIN - environment variable to disable customizations

• identify - useful in makefiles

• root - useful in shell scripts

• log --template - useful in reporting

• status -n0 - output suitable for xargs

4. Advanced history editing

• RebaseExtension

• MqExtension

• HisteditExtension

• EvolveExtension

• strip - part of the MQ extension

5. Niceties for customizers

• ColorExtension - shiny colors

• PagerExtension - for slow readers

• ProgressExtension - for the impatient

6. Debugging

• help --debug - list deprecated and debugging commands

• showconfig --debug - dump configuration info with paths

• debuginstall - show install information

• --debug - run a command with full verbosity
• --traceback - get a complete stack trace for any exception
• --debugger - run a command with an interactive source-level debugger

• debugindex - dump raw revlog graph data

• debugdata - dump raw revlog revision contents data

• debugstate - dump raw dirstate contents

7. Interesting reading

• FileFormats - what all those files are

• Behind the scenes - an overview of the internal data structures

• HandlingLargeFiles - how we deal with files of many megabytes

• EncodingStrategy - how character encoding works