Mercurial vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Mercurial

Stacks229

Followers219

Votes105

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

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.

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Advice on Mercurial, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

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.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

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.

1.04M views1.04M

Comments

410-Ventures

Nov 18, 2020

Review

PyCharm (pro)

great editor designed specifically for Python and python apps
complex (good for configurability, bad for simplicity)
expensive ($200 first year, $120 third year)

PyCharm (free)

same as above but without a REST client or support for other web development tools (which you will likely end up using)
ok to get your feet wet (you can always upgrade later) Full comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

VS Code (free)

Configurable "IDE" with support for most modern languages
TONS of simple-to-install extensions that add functionality
Great docs and UI

Sublime Text (free)

one of the most minimal editors out there
it just works

It's really down to personal preference. But I would recommend downloading all of the FREE editors, getting setup in each, and keeping only the ones you like.

My personal choice for web development is VS Code but I started with Pycharm (free), and use Sublime text on occasion.

Just focus on learning and developing and you will find what features you're looking for.

12.1k views12.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Mercurial	Visual Studio Code
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.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
-	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 229	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 219	Followers 169.1K
Votes 105	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 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 Cons 0 Does not distinguish between local and remote head 0 Track single upstream only	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Windows Fedora FreeBSD Debian Gentoo Linux Mac OS X	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Mercurial, Visual Studio Code?

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.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

Related Comparisons

Mercurial vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Mercurial vs Visual Studio Code

Overview