- Its cross-platform support was superior to Git's. (Git didn't get good Windows support until some years later.)
- Its ergonomics were superior to Git's, which was an important factor on its own, and especially important when trying to get a whole organization to retrain and retool around a distributed model.
- (It had a third major advantage over Git that I unfortunately cannot recall at the moment.)
So you weren't wrong back then...
...but Git improved over time, tipping the scale closer to a balanced state. It also had unbeatable author recognition, making it the obvious choice for anyone unaware of Mercurial's advantages, and eventually leading it to benefit from the network effect. And GitHub appeared, greatly improving Git's ecosystem with no support for Mercurial.
That's a matter of taste. I used both for serious work, at the time, and found Git much more usable. My experience with Mercurial was "welcome to Mercurial, how can we help you merge and push your work in progress even though that's not what you want?" My experience with Git was one where I felt in control at all times, had a clear workflow for when I did and didn't want to publish my changes (and for when I wanted to edit them first), and allowed me to quickly make and switch branches within a single working copy.
Thank you. I vaguely remember being put off by Mercurial at the time and feeling much more comfortable with git, but couldn't have put it into words as well as you did.
People always say you have to know git internals in order to use it, but that's just not true. Git has the right data model and has always been about empowering users to edit their data. Which makes the data model be "in your face" compared to the alternatives (and I think that's what people latch on to when they talk about "internals"), but it ultimately makes for a better tool.
I don't think the internal design is/was that similar. We switched from CVS to git, and were evaluating multiple choices. What tipped the scale in the end was our trust in the internal data model, which for git was the idea that it stores the snapshots, and they are immutable. The diffs you can get out of it are calculated on demand. Even if on-disk storage can end up using some diffs to save on space, the actual conceptual model of every operation is based on those snapshots, and that is also how every new commit is stored before repacking the repository.
This appealed greatly to us, and always meant that it is effortless to undo any operation because it only creates new snapshots, while the previous ones stay there for a while in case you need to recover the previous state.
This is in contrast with Mercurial, where the data store is (was?) a sequence of diffs, and then the state of the working tree at any time is reconstructed on demand from those diffs.
I don't know what you mean by ergonomics, but I remember trying both Mercurial and Git back in the days after using Subversion before. I didn't like how Mercurial didn't easily let me rewrite history and do stuff like `git commit --ammend` or `git rebase`. Mercurial users kept telling me using an extension to manage patches on top of Mercurial (I think it was quilt).
I agree about the Windows support. hg serve was also nice. Plus TortoiseHg.
20 years ago, Mercurial was not the wrong choice.
- Its internal design was very similar to Git's.
- Its cross-platform support was superior to Git's. (Git didn't get good Windows support until some years later.)
- Its ergonomics were superior to Git's, which was an important factor on its own, and especially important when trying to get a whole organization to retrain and retool around a distributed model.
- (It had a third major advantage over Git that I unfortunately cannot recall at the moment.)
So you weren't wrong back then...
...but Git improved over time, tipping the scale closer to a balanced state. It also had unbeatable author recognition, making it the obvious choice for anyone unaware of Mercurial's advantages, and eventually leading it to benefit from the network effect. And GitHub appeared, greatly improving Git's ecosystem with no support for Mercurial.