Versioning tools

Versioning code is one of the important good practices when programming in any language.

Modern Mercurial

Mercurial is a versioning tool like Git (same generation and similar theoretical bases). For very simple things, it is quite similar to Git. However, there are also important differences.

Github and Gitlab do not support Mercurial. Git became for open-source THE tool used for versioning all kinds of projects.

However, Mercurial has been used in companies of all sizes for years and grew up as a great tool, with advantages compared to Git, in particular in terms of simple user interface, safety (no force push needed, no destructive history edition), performance for big repositories (with a growing part written in Rust) and collaborative history edition (with this Mercurial extensions evolve and topic).

Meld

Meld is a graphical diff and merge tool.

Windows

Download and execute the installer here: https://meldmerge.org/

macOS

Install dehesselle-meld with:

brew install --cask dehesselle-meld

Debian-Ubuntu-Mint

sudo apt install meld

Mercurial

Install and setup Mercurial as described here.

Git

Git is nowadays the most popular versioning tool. It is a great tool but it can be a bit difficult and unsafe, especially for beginners.

Windows

Download and install from https://gitforwindows.org/.

macOS

brew install git

Debian-Ubuntu-Mint

sudo apt install git