To the author - I'm in the opposite boat where I've used mercurial for nearly 10 years but any time I try to use git I get lost. Everything in your post rung out to me as why I rather enjoy and understand hg (with exception to absorb which I haven't yet tried).<p>I highly recommend checking out this blog which discusses adding a command which is a customized log. It's made getting a visible understanding of my working state & phases tremendously easy.<p><a href="http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/" rel="nofollow">http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l...</a><p>Additionally if you're planning to use evolve, most of the instructions I've seen for using it indicate installing it via pip, however I've only run into issues with that (as well as coworkers and others). Instead I recommend cloning the evolve repository and pointing the extension location to it (seen in .hgrc gist below). Upgrading is as simple as going into the evolve repo and running `hg up`. I can't wait until it's shipped with mercurial. The evolve repo can be cloned from:<p><a href="https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/evolve" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/evolve</a><p>This is from my .hgrc (for a mac) which customized the wip colors a bit more (and fixes a recent issue where one of the original revset commands used by the blog has been deprecated/removed).<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/neandrake/e770ea7b3d6bf8299f6be2ca0800290c" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/neandrake/e770ea7b3d6bf8299f6be2ca08...</a>