Mercurial "hg status" and relative paths

Question

I'm using both mercurial and git for different projects and like them both. What I find a bit annoying about mercurial is that "hg status" shows paths relative to the repository root, not to the current directory(unlike git). Can this behaviour be tweaked somehow?

Answer 1

The usual workaround is to run:

hg status $(hg root)

For older versions of Mercurial, prior to 1.7, you could use this hack, adding to your repository's ".hg/hgrc" file:

[alias]
 sst = status /path/to/root

That needs the alias extension enabled, so you may have to add "alias=" to your ~/.hgrc file.

Starting with Mercurial 1.7, the alias extension learned about the "!" escape to use shell commands, so you can now have a global alias that does this:

[alias]
sst = !hg status $(hg root)

Don't use st = !hg status $(hg root), since that creates an infinite loop, running hg status over and over. It looks like a bug in the alias parsing - if you want to alias hg status to show the path from the root, then the following incantation works in the global $HOME/.hgrc:

[alias]
__mystatus = status
st = !hg __mystatus $(hg root)

Answer 2

To see workspace status relative to the current directory you can always use "." (a single dot) as the argument of "hg status", i.e.:

% hg root                   # root of the workspace
/work/foo

% pwd                       # current directory is <root>/src
/work/foo/src

% hg status                 # no argument, see all files
M etc/foo.conf              # all files are shown with paths
M src/foosetup.c            # relative to workspace root
%

The difference when you explicitly ask for the current working directory is that the relative filename paths use that as their starting point:

% hg status .               # see only files under current path
M foosetup.c
%