Git Stash for Mercurial Users

One of the really nice features of git is the stash command. It allows you to put some work in progress to the side and get back to a clean working directory, without needing to make an actual commit of half-finished code.

Mercurial doesn’t come with a stash command, but it does have an extension called shelve which does the same thing.

Enabling the Shelve Extension

To turn it on, you need the following lines in your mercurial.ini file (or to enable it in just a single repository, add them to .hg/hgrc):

[extensions]
shelve =

Or if you are using TortoiseHg, you can easily enable the extension in the settings dialog.

Shelving your Changes

Shelving is extremely straightforward. Simply type:

hg shelve

or you can name your shelveset:

hg shelve --name “some name”

Note that shelving only shelves things currently staged for commit, so if you’ve added new files, then do a hg add to make sure they are included in the shelveset.

Now you have a clean working folder, allowing you to work on a different task and make a commit.

Unshelving

Unshelving is really simple. If you have just one shelveset, then all you need to type is:

hg unshelve

If you have more than one shelveset then you can use the name you gave it:

hg unshelve --name “some name”

Note that this will actually perform a merge if necessary (you modified the same files in the meantime). No commit will happen when you do an unshelve; it simply gets you back to where you were, with the same pending changes.

As you can see, this extension is really simple to use, and very useful to have at your disposal if you need to make a quick context switch, or if you start doing some work that turns out to be more complicated than you thought.