title: Mercurial for Beginners: The Definitive Practical Guide
body: <p><em>Inspired by <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/315911/git-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide">Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide</a>.</em></p>
  
  <p>This is a compilation of information on using Mercurial for <strong>beginners</strong> for <strong>practical</strong> use.</p>
  
  <p>Beginner - a programmer who has touched source control without understanding it very well.</p>
  
  <p>Practical - covering situations that the majority of users often encounter - creating a repository, branching, merging, pulling/pushing from/to a remote repository, etc.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Notes</strong>:</p>
    
    <ul>
    <li>Explain how to get something done rather than how something is
    implemented.</li>
    <li>Deal with one question per answer.</li>
    <li>Answer clearly and as concisely as possible.</li>
    <li>Edit/extend an existing answer rather than create a new answer on the
    same topic.</li>
    <li>Please provide a link to the the <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Mercurial wiki</a> or the <a href="http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">HG Book</a> for people who want to learn more.</li>
    </ul>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Questions:</p>
  
  <h2>Installation/Setup</h2>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1184108#1184108">How to install Mercurial?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1402038#1402038">How to set up Mercurial?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1170356#1170356">How do you create a new project/repository?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1170400#1170400">How do you configure it to ignore files?</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <h2>Working with the code</h2>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1251593#1251593">How do you get the latest code?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1387214#1387214">How do you check out code?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1387249#1387249">How do you commit changes?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1174173#1174173">How do you see what's uncommitted, or the status of your current codebase?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/2652038#2652038">How do you remove files from the repository?</a></li>
  <li>How do you destroy unwanted commits?</li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1387288#1387288">How do you compare two revisions of a file, or your current file and a previous revision?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1688455#1688455">How do you see the history of revisions to a file or repository?</a></li>
  <li>How do you handle binary files (visio docs, for instance, or compiler environments)?</li>
  <li>How do you merge files changed at the "same time"?</li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/3353552#3353552">How do you revert a Changeset?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/3698654#3698654">How do you go back to a previous version of the code?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/3904935#3904935">How do you extract a patch from a specific changeset?</a></li>
  <li>How do you record that you renamed or deleted a file without using the Mercurial command?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <h2>Tagging, branching, releases, baselines</h2>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1170430#1170430">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?</a></li>
  <li>How do you pull a particular 'release'?</li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1170368#1170368">How do you branch?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1170373#1170373">How do you merge branches?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/4264059#4264059">How do you merge parts of one branch into another branch?</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <h2>Other</h2>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1551560#1551560">Good GUI/IDE plugin for Mercurial? Advantages/disadvantages?</a></li>
  <li>Any other common tasks a beginner should know?</li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide/1297249#1297249">How do I interface with Subversion?</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <h2>Other Mercurial references</h2>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Mercurial: The Definitive Guide</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Mercurial Wiki</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://peepcode.com/products/meet-mercurial" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Meet Mercurial | Peepcode Screencast</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://tekpub.com/production/hg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Mastering Mercurial | TekPub Screencast</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://hginit.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Hg Init</a> - ground-up Mercurial tutorial</li>
  </ul>