Mercurial is a distributed version control system. Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python.

The key here is distributed. Basically it means that every working copy is a full repository clone itself, so you can work and commit offline then push to the main repository when you see fit. See Wikipedia to read more about distributed systems.

As I was searching for a good VCS to manage local stuff, I literally tried them all. I chose Mercurial because it was distributed, fast, easy to use, open source and written in a decent language.

Once hg¹ is installed, no need to set up anything to put a folder under revision. Just type hg init or select init in the {{TextMate}} bundle² then add and commit all the files and it’s done. All the repository metadata are contained in a .hg folder.

I wonder why everybody uses Subversion. Yes, it’s better than CVS but a distributed system makes much more sense and is easier to use.