For the last three weeks, development on my news program, Iceberg Races, has been in high gear. Each night before bed, I simply zipped up my work and archived it away. This approach was fine at first, as I was hammering out the design as I coded, which meant I took a lot of dead end paths. Large chunks of code and entire files were created and then deleted the next day (as I discovered better implementation methods.) It’s true that the best way to learn a language is to dive right in by writing ‘useful’ program.

On Wednesday, I realized that my code structure had stabilized a week prior and I was overdue for tracking my code in a source revision tool. Luckily, I ran across an amazing Mercurial tutorial and decided to give it a try.

So far I’m loving it. The commands are all straight forward. It was extremely quick to setup, and has perform admirably for the past two three days that I’ve been using it. I’ve summarized the most useful commands below (this is not an exhaustive list):

Command	Description
hg *	All commands start with hg followed by…
init	Create a new repository in current directory.
add	Add new files to repository
remove	Remove file from repository
status	View the status of the files in the repository.
diff	View the differences between two different versions of a file.
commit	Save the current state of the files to the repository.
rollback	Undo the last one commit.
merge	Resolve conflicts in a file.
log	View the revision history.
update	Check out files to a specified revision
push	Copy changes in local repository to a remote repository.
pull	Copy changes in a remote repository and bring them into your local repository.

I’ve bolded the commands that come in the handiest. This includes the operations to save the current state of the repository and how to restore a past state.

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