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Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It offers you the power to efficiently handle projects of any size while using an intuitive interface. It is easy to use and hard to break, making it ideal for anyone working with versioned files. Mercurial delivers a scalable source and version control management system that can fit any type of project, regardless of its size and the number of contributors. Created in Python, it provides distributable binaries for all the major platforms, helping developers with their work. No dependencies are needed by Mercurial, so deployment is easy. It uses the command console to start its main application, displaying all its commands and explanations for each. A thorough read of the extensive, detailed documentation can help you get started if you are not familiar with version control systems. Mercurial can clone repositories and manage changesets committed by a large number of contributors, enabling any team member to browse a specific revision. Changes can be pulled out of other repositories or pushed to another repository.

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

Mercurials 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 OpenJDK (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.