I think I liked the Mercurial branching model better than git, due to the branches being a first class record of events. What I did not know is how common the git rebase/clean linear history would become or a desire to change history on merge.

Mercurial had bookmarks that were roughly the same as git branches.

The linear version numbers were quite useful to reason about and use in places that call for a "number" version number, and were useful relative to your "master" clone. That was not the primary way though, it had hashes like git too, that were the same from clone to clone.

Sequentially numbered versions is still used at main Google monorepo (at least did a few years ago), named "changelist number", from perforce. Up to the point that people define extension field numbers in protobufs using their changelist number, to ensure it will never intersect with anyone else.

I always hear it has far better “tooling” but then the comments say that branching sucks, revisions suck and there is no good got stash equivalent - this is like a third of what I use daily with git.

What does “far better tooling” mean exactly, could you give an example of what amazing tools I’m missing out on (never have used anything else but git, when I came to the industry it was already the standard)

> I also did this. Both in hindsight and at the time, I thought Mercurial had far better tooling.

I recall checking Mercurial back in the day and being puzzled by the lack of basic features such as the ability to stash changes. I also recalled that the community was dismissive of the lack of such a basic feature, with comments such as users could always create local branches, of even we could perhaps install a module such as shelve.

That was the image that Mercurial left with me with regards to git: missing critical features and not bothering to bridge the gap.