Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects. Unlike CVS and Subversion, Mercurial works with distributed repositories which are commonly used in many open source projects today and support distributed development without any centralized control.
The IDE's Mercurial Plugin support enables you to manage changes to version-controlled files as you work. In the IDE, you can call Mercurial commands on both files and directories in the Projects, Files and Favorites windows. The IDE also provides a graphical Diff Viewer, enabling you to compare file revisions, as well as supporting inline diff directly in the editor.
The advantages of a distributed revision control system like Mercurial are:
The IDE provides several file status information tools that simplify the process of working with version-controlled files, including:
The IDE's Mercurial support is similar in style to the IDE's Subversion support. The main difference is as Mercurial is a distributed revision control system, you typically begin by cloning an external repository to work with. This clone is a complete copy of the repository including the revision history. You can clone this local copy as often as you like, and when you want to you can push your changes back to the original repository provided you have permissions, or export your changes and send them to the owner if you do not.
For further documentation on the Mercurial Plugin support and Mercurial itself, see the following resources: