mercurial/help/templates.txt

pathcomplete: complete directories more conservatively

Suppose we want to perform a single-level completion (i.e. without
--full) of "fi" in a repo containing "fee", "fie/dead", "fie/live",
and "foe".

If we give back "fie/" as the only answer, the shell will consider
the completion to be unambiguous, and will append a space after the
completion.  We can't complete "fie/live" or "fie/dead" without
first backspacing over that space.

We used to thus create two fake names, "fie/a" and "fie/b", to force
the shell to consider the completion to be ambiguous. It would then
stop at "fie/" without appending a space, allowing us to hit tab
again to complete "fie/live" or "fie/dead".

The change here arises from realising that we only need to force
the shell to consider a completion as ambiguous if we have exactly
one directory and zero files as possible completions.

This prevents spurious names from showing up as possible completions
when they don't need to be invented in the first place.

Mercurial allows you to customize output of commands through
templates. You can either pass in a template from the command
line, via the --template option, or select an existing
template-style (--style).

You can customize output for any "log-like" command: log,
outgoing, incoming, tip, parents, heads and glog.

Four styles are packaged with Mercurial: default (the style used
when no explicit preference is passed), compact, changelog,
and xml.
Usage::

    $ hg log -r1 --style changelog

A template is a piece of text, with markup to invoke variable
expansion::

    $ hg log -r1 --template "{node}\n"
    b56ce7b07c52de7d5fd79fb89701ea538af65746

Strings in curly braces are called keywords. The availability of
keywords depends on the exact context of the templater. These
keywords are usually available for templating a log-like command:

.. keywordsmarker

The "date" keyword does not produce human-readable output. If you
want to use a date in your output, you can use a filter to process
it. Filters are functions which return a string based on the input
variable. Be sure to use the stringify filter first when you're
applying a string-input filter to a list-like input variable.
You can also use a chain of filters to get the desired output::

   $ hg tip --template "{date|isodate}\n"
   2008-08-21 18:22 +0000

List of filters:

.. filtersmarker

Note that a filter is nothing more than a function call, i.e.
``expr|filter`` is equivalent to ``filter(expr)``.

In addition to filters, there are some basic built-in functions:

- date(date[, fmt])

- fill(text[, width])

- get(dict, key)

- if(expr, then[, else])

- ifeq(expr, expr, then[, else])

- join(list, sep)

- label(label, expr)

- sub(pat, repl, expr)

- rstdoc(text, style)

Also, for any expression that returns a list, there is a list operator:

- expr % "{template}"

Some sample command line templates:

- Format lists, e.g. files::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "files:\n{files % '  {file}\n'}"

- Join the list of files with a ", "::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "files: {join(files, ', ')}\n"

- Format date::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{date(date, '%Y')}\n"

- Output the description set to a fill-width of 30::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{fill(desc, '30')}"

- Use a conditional to test for the default branch::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{ifeq(branch, 'default', 'on the main branch',
   'on branch {branch}')}\n"

- Append a newline if not empty::

   $ hg tip --template "{if(author, '{author}\n')}"

- Label the output for use with the color extension::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{label('changeset.{phase}', node|short)}\n"

- Invert the firstline filter, i.e. everything but the first line::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{sub(r'^.*\n?\n?', '', desc)}\n"