Last time I checked mercurial has better windows-support and tooling. And since the concepts generally is the same they should have no issue learning git later on if the need it.
Ask HN: Git or Mercurial for beginning students?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: Git or Mercurial for beginning students?
#12I guess that they are simply not accustomed to work in command line, given that Windows gives terrible terminal and shell. I would rather expose them to Linux (or maybe BSD), possibly through providing them shell accounts on some server and requiring code to be built primarly there. Then it should not be too difficult to jump from working with files in command line to working with version control in the same command…
>given that Windows gives terrible terminal and shell Though the command set is a little verbose I think powershell is pretty nice. If you get posh-git( https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git ) and use powershell it makes the git experience on windows quite pleasurable.
> Though the command set is a little verbose I think powershell is pretty nice.
Last time I checked, PowerShell made more or less sensible programming language, but was awful in term of command completion. If that hasn't changed, it is still a terrible shell.
Re: Ask HN: Git or Mercurial for beginning students?
#13Last time I checked mercurial has better windows-support and tooling. And since the concepts generally is the same they should have no issue learning git later on if the need it. http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/
The windows support was one of the issues that I was considering. I think you are right that it is a bit better than Git from that standpoint.
Re: Ask HN: Git or Mercurial for beginning students?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
>given that Windows gives terrible terminal and shell Though the command set is a little verbose I think powershell is pretty nice. If you get posh-git( https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git ) and use powershell it makes the git experience on windows quite pleasurable.
> Though the command set is a little verbose I think powershell is pretty nice. Last time I checked, PowerShell made more or less sensible programming language, but was awful in term of command completion. If that hasn't changed, it is still a terrible shell.
The commands themselves are verbose but I've never had a problem with completion. Can you highlight some problems you had?
Re: Ask HN: Git or Mercurial for beginning students?
#15I guess that they are simply not accustomed to work in command line, given that Windows gives terrible terminal and shell. I would rather expose them to Linux (or maybe BSD), possibly through providing them shell accounts on some server and requiring code to be built primarly there. Then it should not be too difficult to jump from working with files in command line to working with version control in the same command…
If using the commandline is the main problem, why not use a git GUI interface? (Would Github's be of any use?) I'm not saying learning the commandline is not important, but that would split the learning load so they only have to learn one new concept at a time (only cmd or vcs instead of both together).
Some did use SourceTree, although I emphasized the command line more. Perhaps I should move toward having them use the GUI versions.