MacHg / Murky / TortoiseHg - which to use?

Question

I started using Mercurial and chose MacHg as my GUI of choice, simply because it was the first thing I found when I googled Mercurial Mac GUI. However, I just recently discovered Murky, and TortoiseHg was recently updated for the Mac. Are there any significant reasons I should choose one over the other, or is the decision simply which application's interface I like the best?

Answer 1

I am the author of MacHg so of course am biased. Re Murky, it hasn't been kept up to date and it will fall over with large scale repositories when viewing history. It has to parse the whole history graph to lay it out (it uses the top level 'hg log'). Through a neat trick MacHg does this incrementally so if you have 200,000 commits MacHg doesn't need to read them all to figure out how to display them it can jump right to the place you are viewing. TortiseHg also suffers from having to read and parse the whole history although it can do this much faster than Murky (since TortiseHg uses faster lower level calls to get the data) (as reported to me by others.)

SourceTree seems like an ok solution. It is supported now commercially by Atlassian who do Bitbucket and they are a nice bunch of guys. However, as of my last test of SourceTree(1.4.3.1) it appears to be limited by the same problems. For instance one test case I use is the OpenOffice mercurial repository which is some 3Gigs with 260,000 revisions. Trying to view the graph for say revision 150,000 is really really slow in these other programs. I quit SourceTree after 5 minutes of waiting.

Also MacHg has some nicer history and rebasing tools if I do say so myself. SourceTree right now has better integration with some of the external services like Bitbucket and GitHub although it is not difficult at all to add repositories in MacHg (simple drag and drop or open, or paste in a string, etc...) Neither MacHg or SourceTree (AFAIK) have support for phases yet but I plan to add these very shortly as I am sure SourceTree will as well. TortiseHg has support for phases I think right now.

And well, I like "look and feel" of MacHg of course :)

You can't go too wrong with MacHg, or TortiseHg, or SourceTree unless you have large repositories in which case I would opt for MacHg for now.

Cheers, Jason

Answer 2

This question is sort of subjective, but I've found SourceTree to be a good solution for visualizing your working copy. However, for the most part, I just use the terminal to commit/push/pull/update.