How do you consider the UX "nearly identical" or "arguably worse"?

The Mercurial CLI has clear, well named commands that are predictable and easy to memorize. hg histedit is clean and easy to use and visually shows you what is going to happen - what the new order will be - nondestructively.

The Git CLI requires you to understand its internal data structures to understand the difference between a rebase and a merge, and most people still can't explain it.

I've worked with Mercurial for 5+ years and no one on my team has ever given up on a client and done rm -rf to start anew. Every single git user I've talked to has done that multiple times.

I thought it was enormously better because it helped you not to cut yourself with all the dangerous things in a way that git didn't. It also had an excellent GUI (thg).

It was a much less stressful tool to use and git hasn't really got much better since then - I've just converted a repo to git and the team using it have had about 4 unpleasant mistakes in the last week as they adapt.

As for speed.....I cannot say I ever noticed any problem. Waiting around for the version control system has never been an issue for me.......except a git repo with 70,000 commits and we worked out how to merge a lot of those to fix the problem.

Writing your tooling in python is valid while starting out and prototyping.

One of the big criticisms I've seen levied against Rust is that refactoring is extremely difficult, so prototyping on ideas in the language itself is a poor experience.

I've personally had great success using python, then gradually rewriting the tool I have with py03 to "oxidise" the program iteratively.

Starting with C was great for performance of Git, but damn if it's not a terrible UX these days, I can believe that the choice of toolchain and language was a contributor to that fact.

I’ve never met a single person who can use git to move a commit and its descendants from one parent to another. This requires using the extremely unintuitive `git rebase --onto A B C` invocation. The only exception are magit users who are dealing with a much better interface and a better name (magit calls it rebase subset rather than onto).

In contrast every single mercurial user I know can intuitively use `hg rebase` with its `-s` and `-d` flags. That’s one giant difference in UX.

> The UX is almost the same as git,

I've used git and mercurial for roughly the same amount of time.

Your statement is, frankly, something that makes me question your sanity. They're not remotely similar. Outside of something like Perforce, I've not used a VCS with a worse UI.