There is a lot that the base Mercurial can do, but a robust extension mechanism allows all kinds of nice enhancements. We use BigFiles, and Forest, but there is lots more you can do. All of the publicly available extensions are listed at http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/UsingExtensions. Here are some of my favorite mercurial extensions and how I use them.

Note: My company recently started using Mercurial. I wrote this article to provide some education on the value of branches.

There have been some emails flying around discussing making branches so we can “isolate changes.” I thought some discussion of what a branch is and what it is good for was warranted.