Is there any way to change how graphs are drawn in TortoiseHg?

Question

Being used to how ClearCase draw graphs I find Mercurial's and TortoiseHg's way confusing at first glance.

This is how I'd like it to be represented. With static positions for branches. E.g. Maintenance branch to the left/right always and preferably in a straight line and not the current spaghetti curved branch it is now (see below link).

This is how it looks using the TortoiseHg Explorer. The graph is from a test repository. :-)

Is there any way to change how graphs are drawn in Mercurial?

Answer 1

AT the moment, there seem nothing available to do visualization in the way you want it.

I guess the visualization of TortoiseHg explorer is straight from the graphlog extension.

• http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/GraphlogExtension

How ever, there is a graphviz based visualization, though it is similar to graphlog but you can hack it any way to make it more visually better.

• http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/~foozy/fujiguruma/scm/hg-visualize.en.html

Answer 2

The problem is that any forking commit creates an "anonymous" branch (as opposed to a named branch, which is a slightly different concept), and the default graph view can't place commits in static columns without having good ids. Thus, the implementor gave up and we have the current graph.

Now, I think the first view you give is awesome, and it should be possible to use some heuristics to assign ids to anonymous branches depending on (developer1-a, developer2-a, developer2-b, etc). That'd be cool. :)

Contribution time!