Mercurial with TortoiseHG: The Basics [Video]

Thg-basics

Last Thursday I was hyped on having my own video tutorial. I got a lot of things in mind and felt I need to share some of them. One of the very needed solutions for most web designers and web developers is version control. VCS or version control systems (some call it revision control) is an application to manage the changes of your files (css, xhtml, php, py, etc).

There are a lot VCS out there. The most famous is Subversion. I don't use it because it's evil (said by Linus), hehe. Other one is Git, reeeeeeally really famous maybe because of github and the linux kernel. Why the heck I chose Mercurial? It's because of TortoiseHG, the windows support, development, and releases is always moving forward. It also has a very good implementation of the user interface, it is not perfect, but it is so much usable than the other ones I tried. That's for my quick intro (I actually forgot to talk about these in making the video, hehe).  

Here it is, my very first video tutorial!

I know my tutorial is kinda noobish but I'll definitely do better next time. I hope you'll find this useful! ;D

Update

I made another tutorial on Installing TortoiseHG in Ubuntu. Watch it here.

14 comments

Mar 20, 2010
Andrew Abogado said...
Now this is what I've been waiting for. Thanks you for this Mon.
Mar 20, 2010
No problem drew. Your welcome. Maybe I'll do an Ubuntu version of this. ;D
Apr 05, 2010
Andrew Abogado said...
I'll definitely wait for that Ubuntu tut. But I'm roaming around the net for an Ubuntu tut. Will share if I can find one.
Apr 05, 2010
Andrew Abogado said...
Now that I found a GUI for Ubuntu through this tutorial, http://tinyurl.com/mercurial-ubuntu-gui , I can now follow your tut. Thanks Mon.
Apr 11, 2010
Brian Temecula said...
Thanks for the video. I have never used a VCS before, and I want to learn quickly, but the documentation is hard to understand. I hope you will do more videos of TortoiseHg. For instance, learning what a Fork is, how to work with other people, etc.
Apr 22, 2010
George Tujan said...
Nice one Mon! thanks
Oct 27, 2010
art said...
Nice Tut Mon !!! Keep it coming :). Greetings from the ME.
Mar 04, 2011
Josh said...
good job dude. thankx. yes...do the fork and merge! and when to push and pull..?
Mar 04, 2011
Hello Josh,

Thanks for dropping by :D . It actually depends when to push and pull.

For individuals doing version control. Push and pull can take place when you feel your fork is stable. For me, I just push for backup purposes then sync with dropbox.

For a team, push and pull can take place on merging files, or just looking at how others do in there repos.

There are a lot of things you can do in using dvcs. It's very flexible to mess things up while it's very simple to do things like it should.

Mar 04, 2011
Josh said...
Very cool of you to get back to me.
Q:Do you have to clone the repository to do a fork? ... Or can that happen inside the same one?

Josh

Mar 04, 2011
Yes as far as I know, a clone can be called a "new repo" or a "fork".

If you do create repos inside other repos, just do so. By default tortoisehg/mercurial will just ignore it. But if you want the higher level repo to acknowledge the low level repos, then do check reading about "mercurial subrepository".

Cheers

Mar 04, 2011
Mar 04, 2011
Josh said...
<tr><td>Shoot..I meant to add this one: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/
:)

---</td></tr>
Jul 30, 2011
ravi said...
very good intro for tortoise Hg. Great Job

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