Are my changes gone after "hg revert"?

Question

After my last commit I wrote a bunch of code. Before committing again, I ran hg add. It added some files I was not interested in, so I ran

$ hg revert --all

thinking that all the added files would go away. They did go away, but I also reverted all the code written since the last commit, which means a ton of work was lost! What are my options?

Answer 1

When you hg revert a file (or --all files), Mercurial saves a backup of the file under another name. This is to make it harder for you to lose work. If the file was called foo, you will have a foo.orig with the original version.

You can use

$ hg status --all --include "**.orig"

to see all the .orig files in your working copy. Move the ones you need back, re-add them and commit.

On a related note: people sometimes add the --no-backup flag to their [defaults] section in order to get rid of the .orig files Mercurial scatter around. I think this a really bad idea... just ignore the .orig files instead by adding

syntax: glob
*.orig

to your .hgignore file. That's much safer and one day you'll be happy that you have these .orig file lying around :-)