Git and Mercurial - Compare and Contrast

Question

For a while now I've been using subversion for my personal projects.

More and more I keep hearing great things about Git and Mercurial, and DVCS in general.

I'd like to give the whole DVCS thing a whirl, but I'm not too familiar with either option.

What are some of the differences between Mercurial and Git?

Note: I'm not trying to find out which one is "best" or even which one I should start with. I'm mainly looking for key areas where they are similar, and where they are different because I am interested to know how they differ in terms of implementation and philosophy.

Answer 1

Git saves a record of every version of committed files internally, while Mercurial or Hg saves just the changesets which can have a smaller footprint. 

Let us take a look at the commands in both Git and Hg.