Inspired by Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide.
This is a compilation of information on using Mercurial for beginners for practical use.
Beginner - a programmer who has touched source control without understanding it very well.
Practical - covering situations that the majority of users often encounter - creating a repository, branching, merging, pulling/pushing from/to a remote repository, etc.
Notes:
Explain how to get something done rather than how something is
implemented.
Deal with one question per answer.
Answer clearly and as concisely as possible.
Edit/extend an existing answer rather than create a new answer on the
same topic.
Please provide a link to the the Mercurial wiki or the HG Book for people who want to learn more.
Questions:
Installation/Setup
How to install Mercurial?
How to set up Mercurial?
How do you create a new project/repository?
How do you configure it to ignore files?
Working with the code
How do you get the latest code?
How do you check out code?
How do you commit changes?
How do you see what's uncommitted, or the status of your current codebase?
How do you destroy unwanted commits?
How do you compare two revisions of a file, or your current file and a previous revision?
How do you see the history of revisions to a file?
How do you handle binary files (visio docs, for instance, or compiler environments)?
How do you merge files changed at the "same time"?
Tagging, branching, releases, baselines
How do you 'mark' 'tag' or 'release' a particular set of revisions for a particular set of files so you can always pull that one later?
How do you pull a particular 'release'?
How do you branch?
How do you merge branches?
How do you merge parts of one branch into another branch?
Other
Good GUI/IDE plugin for Mercurial? Advantages/disadvantages?
Any other common tasks a beginner should know?
How do I interface with Subversion?
Other Mercurial references
Mercurial: The Definitive Guide
Mercurial Wiki
Meet Mercurial | Peepcode Screencast
