Mercurial vs Visual Studio Code

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Mercurial

231
218
+ 1
105
Visual Studio Code

177.5K
161.8K
+ 1
2.3K
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Mercurial vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Mercurial and Visual Studio Code are two tools that serve different purposes in the software development workflow. While Mercurial is a distributed version control system (DVCS) used to manage source code, Visual Studio Code is a code editor that provides a wide range of features to enhance code writing and development. In this article, we will explore the key differences between Mercurial and Visual Studio Code.

1. Repository Management: Mercurial is primarily designed for repository management, allowing developers to track changes, manage branches, and collaborate with other team members. It provides a centralized repository where all the source code is stored, and users can clone, push, and pull changes from this central repository. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code does not offer built-in repository management capabilities. It relies on third-party extensions like Git to provide version control integration.

2. Code Editing and Development: Visual Studio Code is primarily focused on code editing and development. It provides a rich set of features such as syntax highlighting, code completion, debugging, and integrated terminal, enabling developers to write, refactor, and debug code efficiently. Mercurial, on the other hand, does not provide code editing features. It is solely focused on version control and does not offer any capabilities for code development.

3. Collaboration and Teamwork: Mercurial promotes collaboration among team members by allowing multiple developers to work on the same codebase simultaneously. It provides features like merging and branching that facilitate collaboration and enable developers to work on different features or bug fixes in parallel. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is primarily designed for individual developers and does not offer advanced collaboration features.

4. Integration with IDEs and Tools: Visual Studio Code is highly extensible and allows developers to integrate with various IDEs and tools. It provides a rich ecosystem of extensions that enhance its functionality, including integrations with popular IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. Mercurial, on the other hand, is a standalone tool that does not have direct integration with IDEs. It can be used alongside IDEs, but it does not provide seamless integration like Visual Studio Code.

5. Support for Multiple Programming Languages: Visual Studio Code is known for its excellent language support. It offers built-in support for various programming languages, including but not limited to JavaScript, Python, Java, and C#. It provides features like IntelliSense, code snippets, and debugging capabilities specific to each language. Mercurial, however, is programming language agnostic and does not offer any language-specific features.

In Summary, Mercurial is a distributed version control system focused on repository management, collaboration, and version control, while Visual Studio Code is a code editor focused on code editing, development, and integration with IDEs and tools.

Decisions about Mercurial and Visual Studio Code
Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 997K views

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.3M views

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.2M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Pros of Mercurial
Pros of Visual Studio Code
  • 18
    A lot easier to extend than git
  • 17
    Easy-to-grasp system with nice tools
  • 13
    Works on windows natively without cygwin nonsense
  • 11
    Written in python
  • 9
    Free
  • 8
    Fast
  • 6
    Better than Git
  • 6
    Best GUI
  • 4
    Better than svn
  • 2
    Hg inc
  • 2
    Good user experience
  • 2
    TortoiseHg - Unified free gui for all platforms
  • 2
    Consistent UI
  • 2
    Easy-to-use
  • 2
    Native support to all platforms
  • 1
    Free to use
  • 340
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 308
    Fast
  • 193
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
  • 126
    Git integration
  • 106
    Intellisense
  • 78
    Faster than Atom
  • 53
    Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
  • 45
    Great Refactoring Tools
  • 44
    Good Plugins
  • 42
    Terminal
  • 38
    Superb markdown support
  • 36
    Open Source
  • 35
    Extensions
  • 26
    Awesome UI
  • 26
    Large & up-to-date extension community
  • 24
    Powerful and fast
  • 22
    Portable
  • 18
    Best editor
  • 18
    Best code editor
  • 17
    Easy to get started with
  • 15
    Lots of extensions
  • 15
    Good for begginers
  • 15
    Crossplatform
  • 15
    Built on Electron
  • 14
    Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
  • 14
    Extensions for everything
  • 14
    All Languages Support
  • 13
    Easy to use and learn
  • 12
    Extensible
  • 12
    "fast, stable & easy to use"
  • 11
    Ui design is great
  • 11
    Useful for begginer
  • 11
    Totally customizable
  • 11
    Git out of the box
  • 11
    Faster edit for slow computer
  • 10
    SSH support
  • 10
    Great community
  • 10
    Fast Startup
  • 9
    Great language support
  • 9
    It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
  • 9
    Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
  • 9
    Powerful Debugger
  • 8
    Can compile and run .py files
  • 8
    Python extension is fast
  • 7
    Great document formater
  • 7
    Features rich
  • 6
    He is not Michael
  • 6
    Awesome multi cursor support
  • 6
    She is not Rachel
  • 6
    Extension Echosystem
  • 5
    VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
  • 5
    SFTP Workspace
  • 5
    Very proffesional
  • 5
    Language server client
  • 5
    Easy azure
  • 4
    Has better support and more extentions for debugging
  • 4
    Supports lots of operating systems
  • 4
    Virtualenv integration
  • 4
    Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
  • 3
    Emmet preinstalled
  • 3
    More tools to integrate with vs
  • 3
    Has more than enough languages for any developer
  • 3
    Better autocompletes than Atom
  • 3
    'batteries included'
  • 2
    Microsoft
  • 2
    Light
  • 2
    Big extension marketplace
  • 2
    CMake support with autocomplete
  • 2
    Fast and ruby is built right in
  • 2
    VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
  • 2
    Customizable

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Cons of Mercurial
Cons of Visual Studio Code
  • 0
    Track single upstream only
  • 0
    Does not distinguish between local and remote head
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 13
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
  • 10
    Poor autocomplete
  • 8
    Super Slow
  • 8
    Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
  • 8
    Microsoft sends telemetry data
  • 7
    Poor in PHP
  • 6
    It's MicroSoft
  • 3
    Poor in Python
  • 3
    No Built in Browser Preview
  • 3
    No color Intergrator
  • 3
    Very basic for java development and buggy at times
  • 3
    No built in live Preview
  • 3
    Electron
  • 2
    Bad Plugin Architecture
  • 2
    Powered by Electron
  • 1
    Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
  • 1
    Slow C++ Language Server

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What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python. Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds.

What is Visual Studio Code?

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

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What companies use Mercurial?
What companies use Visual Studio Code?
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What tools integrate with Mercurial?
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Blog Posts

Mar 4 2020 at 5:14PM

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What are some alternatives to Mercurial and Visual Studio Code?
Apache Storm
Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system. Storm makes it easy to reliably process unbounded streams of data, doing for realtime processing what Hadoop did for batch processing. Storm has many use cases: realtime analytics, online machine learning, continuous computation, distributed RPC, ETL, and more. Storm is fast: a benchmark clocked it at over a million tuples processed per second per node. It is scalable, fault-tolerant, guarantees your data will be processed, and is easy to set up and operate.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
SVN (Subversion)
Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
See all alternatives