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Let's say I have a local and a remote Mercurial repository. Now, I start working on a feature. I work on it, and when I think it's done, I commit the changeset. Testing it a bit more, I find that I could further improve this feature by tweaking something in the code. I make the change and commit. 20 minutes later, I find there's a bug in this new feature, so I fix it and commit that too.

I now have 3 changesets that I would really like to push to the remote repository as one changeset with message "Implementing feature X", for instance.

How can I do this without much hassle? I believe I could do it with patches, but it seems like a lot of work.

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Clearly it's not my place to talk you out of trying to compress your changesets, but you might want to consider that half the value of version control is answering "why" not just "what" months and years later. An accurate representation of how a feature came about, and in what stages, might be of future value. Discarding it seems so... unversioncontrolly. –  Ry4an Jul 31 '09 at 3:59
@Ry4an: You get a point just for 'unversioncontrolly'. –  Joel B Fant Aug 3 '09 at 20:35
Heh, thanks Joel. :) –  Ry4an Aug 7 '09 at 1:54
collapse provides a subset of the features of histedit, and histedit has a much more intuative UX. –  Stefan Rusek Oct 13 '09 at 20:10
It also provides a mechanism to edit the merged changeset message. –  Stefan Rusek Oct 13 '09 at 20:21
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8 Answers

up vote 27 down vote accepted

How about the Collapse Extension?

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God bless you, this is exactly what I wanted. :D –  Lucas Jul 29 '09 at 16:06
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The histedit extension is exactly what you are looking for.

hg histedit -o


hg histedit --outgoing

will bring up a list of the outgoing changesets. From the list you can

  • Fold 2 or more changesets creating one single changeset
  • Drop changesets removing them from the history
  • Reorder changesets however you like.

histedit will prompt you for the new commit message of the folded changesets which it defaults to the two messages with "\n***\n" separating them.

You can also get similar results using the mq extension, but it is a lot more difficult.

You can also use the collapse extension to just do folding, but it doesn't provide as nice a UI and doesn't provide a way to edit the resulting commit message. Editing the resulting commit message also allows for cleaning up the final message, which is something I always end up utilizing.

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thanks, thats exactly what i needed. It'd be nice if you could do it from within TortoiseHg - but the command line is simple enough. –  sylvanaar Oct 13 '09 at 12:45
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My preferred method of using mq for this folding is using TortoiseHg as described here. However, it can easily be done from the command line like so:

hg qimport -r <first>:<last> 
    -- where <first> and <last> are the first and last changesets 
    -- in the range of revisions you want to collapse

hg qpop <first>.diff
    -- remove all except for the first patch from the queue
    -- note: mq names patches <#>.diff when it imports them, so we're using that here

hg qfold <next>.diff
    -- where <next> is <first>+1, then <first>+2, until you've reached <last>

hg qfinish -a
    -- apply the folded changeset back into the repository

(There may be a better way to do the qfold step, but I'm not aware of it, as I usually use TortoiseHg for that operation.)

It seems a little complicated at first, but once you've started using mq, it's pretty straightforward and natural -- plus you can do all kinds of other things with mq that can be pretty handy!

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Yes, you can do it with patches: Let's assume your work is in changesets 100 through 110, inclusive

  1. Create a patch:

    % hg export -o mypatch 100:110

  2. Update to 99:

    % hg update 99

  3. Apply the patch with --no-commit (otherwise you'll get all your changesets back):

    % hg import --no-commit mypatch

  4. Commit all changes at once:

    % hg commit

  5. You now have two heads (110 and 111) which should be equivalent in terms of files they produce in your working directory -- maybe diff them for sanity before stripping the old ones out:

    % hg strip 100

OK, now that I have spelled it all out, it does seem lengthy, but having done it a bunch of times myself, I don't find it to be too much of a chore...

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Great answer, but there is a prerequisite: the MQ extension must be enabled. –  Chris Kelly Jun 13 '12 at 14:04
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If you are using GUI, use can just select two revisions (use CTRL to select not subsequent ones), right click and select "Compress History".

After that you'll get a new change list in new head starting from the first change you selected before, it will contain all descendant change lists between the ones you selected.

You can simply strip out old change lists if you don't need them anymore: use MQ extensions for it. Again, in GUI: right click on the first change list that needs to be stripped with all it's descendants, "Modify History -> Strip".

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GUI == TortoiseHg –  dfjacobs May 14 '11 at 21:21
Did you mean TortoiseHg? –  Tshepang Sep 30 '13 at 4:19
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I've never used Mercurial, but this sounds a lot like what Martin Fowler was talking about on his blog not too long ago:


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That looks more than a bit complicated, but thanks for the link. Honestly I'm hoping for some magical extension that will do just what I want, like fetch and transplant did with pulling and cherry-picking changsets. –  Lucas Jul 29 '09 at 14:43
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hg collapse and hg histedit are the best ways. Or, rather, would be the best ways, if they worked reliably... I got histedit to crash with a stack dump within three minutes. Collapse is not that much better.

Thought I might share two other BKMs:

  1. hg rebase --collapse

    This extension is distributed with Mercurial. I haven't had problems with it yet. You may have to play some games to work around hg rebase limitations -- basically, it doesn't like rebasing to an ancestor on the same branch, named or default, although it does allow it if rebasing between (named) branches.

  2. Move the repository (foo/.hg) to the working directory (bar) and its files. Not the other way around.

Some people have talked about creating two clone trees, and copying files between them. Or patching between them. Instead, its easier to move the .hg directories.

hg clone project work
... lots of edits
... hg pull, merge, resolve
hg clone project, clean
mv work/.hg .hg.work
mv clean/.hg work/.hg
cd work
... if necessary, pull, nerge, reconcile - but that would only happen because of a race
hg push

This works as long as the true repositories, the .hg trees, are independent of the working directory and its files.

If they are not independent...

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HistEdit will do what you want, but it's probably overkill. If the only thing you need is to fold some changesets together the Collapse Extension will do the job.

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though it does provide a much easier to use and understand UI, which is more than enough of a reason to use it, but it also provides a mechanism to edit the merged changeset message, which is another thing that I always want to do when I merge changesets. –  Stefan Rusek Oct 13 '09 at 20:21
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