Tweaks to default Hg config
The default mercurial installation does not support colours, pager or a progress bar by default. Unlike git, hg is highly customisable with python and a ton of extensions are available. Some of these extensions are bundled with mercurial and other nice ones can be found across the web.
Color Output:
Mercurial by default outputs all the diffs and logs using the default colour of the terminal. Mercurial standard library has support for colours by adding this line to .hgrc.
[extensions]
color=
Progress Bar:
Mercurial is generally fast but in certain cases(like a slow network) or a big repository, some of the commands take a considerable amount of time and mercurial command line does not produce any output until the action is complete. You can get a kickass progress bar by adding the following line in .hgrc.
[extensions]
progress=
Pager:
Most of the mercurial output is redirected to STDOUT without using less / more support. While this makes sense for default install, its painful when reading big diff logs or trying to traverse the hg graph log. You can add support to use less by adding this to your .hgrc.
[extensions]
pager=
[pager]
pager = LESS='FSRX' less
ignore = version, help, update, serve, record
Git diff:
For people who are used to reading git diff formatted files, you can enable use git diff format by specifying the following to your .hgrc
[diff]
git = True
My .hgrc can be found in this gist.