Quick Start Mercurial: An introduction for the impatient. 

Thanks to the Author/Publisher.

1. Setting a username

The first thing you should do is set the username Mercurial will use for commits. It's best to configure a proper email address in ~/.hgrc ¹ (or on a Windows system in %USERPROFILE%\Mercurial.ini) by creating it and adding lines like the following:

[ui]
username = John Doe 

2. Working on an existing Mercurial project

If you have a URL to a browsable project repository (for example http://selenic.com/hg), you can grab a copy like so:

$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg mercurial-repo
real URL is http://www.selenic.com/hg/
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 9633 changesets with 19124 changes to 1271 files
updating to branch default
1084 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

This will create a new directory called mercurial-repo, grab the complete project history, and check out the most recent changeset on the default branch.

The 'summary' command will summarize the state of the working directory. Command names may be abbreviated, so entering just 'hg sum' is enough:

$ hg sum
parent: 9632:16698d87ad20 tip
 util: use sys.argv[0] if $HG is unset and 'hg' is not in PATH
branch: default
commit: (clean)
update: (current)

Here commit: (clean) means that there no local changes, update: (current) means that 

the checked out files (in the working directory) are updated to the newest revision 

in the repository.  

3. Setting up a new Mercurial project

You'll want to start by creating a repository in the directory containing your project:

$ cd project/
$ hg init           # creates .hg

Mercurial will look for a file named .hgignore 
 in the root of your repository which contains a set of glob patterns 
and regular expressions to ignore in file paths. Here's an example .hgignore file: 

syntax: glob
*.orig
*.rej
*~
*.o
tests/*.err

syntax: regexp
.*\#.*\#$

Test your .hgignore file with 'status': 

$ hg status         # show all non-ignored files

This will list all files that are not ignored with a '?' flag (not tracked). 

Edit your '.hgignore' file until only files you want to track are listed by status. 

You'll want to track your .hgignore file too! But you'll probably not want to 
track files generated by your build process. Once you're satisfied, 
schedule your files to be added, then commit:  

$ hg add            # add those 'unknown' files
$ hg commit         # commit all changes into a new changeset, edit changelog entry
$ hg parents        # see the currently checked out revision (or changeset)

To get help on commands, simply run: 

$ hg help

4. Clone, commit, merge

 

$ hg clone project project-work    # clone repository
$ cd project-work
$ 
$ hg commit
$ cd ../project
$ 
$ hg commit
$ hg pull ../project-work   # pull changesets from project-work
$ hg merge                  # merge the new tip from project-work into our working directory
$ hg parents                # see the revisions that have been merged into the working directory
$ hg commit                 # commit the result of the merge

5. Exporting a patch

(make changes)
$ hg commit
$ hg export tip    # export the most recent commit

6. Network support

# clone from the primary Mercurial repo
$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg/
$ cd hg

# pull new changesets from an existing other repo into the repository (.hg)
$ hg pull http://selenic.com/hg/

# export your current repo via HTTP with browsable interface on port 8000
$ hg serve -n "My repo"

# push changesets to a remote repo with SSH
$ hg push ssh://user@example.com/hg/