mercurial/help/environment.txt

flags: allow specifying --no-boolean-flag on the command line (BC)

This makes it much easier to enable some anti-foot-shooting features
(like update --check) by default, because now all boolean flags can be
explicitly disabled on the command line without having to use HGPLAIN
or similar. Flags which don't deserve this treatment can be removed
from consideration by adding them to the nevernegate set in fancyopts.

This doesn't make it any easier to identify when a flag is set: opts
still always gets filled in, either with the user-specified flag value
or with the default from the flags list in the command
table. Improving that would probably clean things up a bit, but for
now if you want a boolean flag and care if it was explicitly false or
default false (or true, but nobody uses that functionality because
before now it was nonsense) you need to use None as your default
rather than True or False.

This doesn't (yet) update help output, because I'm not quite sure how
to do that cleanly.

HG
    Path to the 'hg' executable, automatically passed when running
    hooks, extensions or external tools. If unset or empty, this is
    the hg executable's name if it's frozen, or an executable named
    'hg' (with %PATHEXT% [defaulting to COM/EXE/BAT/CMD] extensions on
    Windows) is searched.

HGEDITOR
    This is the name of the editor to run when committing. See EDITOR.

    (deprecated, use configuration file)

HGENCODING
    This overrides the default locale setting detected by Mercurial.
    This setting is used to convert data including usernames,
    changeset descriptions, tag names, and branches. This setting can
    be overridden with the --encoding command-line option.

HGENCODINGMODE
    This sets Mercurial's behavior for handling unknown characters
    while transcoding user input. The default is "strict", which
    causes Mercurial to abort if it can't map a character. Other
    settings include "replace", which replaces unknown characters, and
    "ignore", which drops them. This setting can be overridden with
    the --encodingmode command-line option.

HGENCODINGAMBIGUOUS
    This sets Mercurial's behavior for handling characters with
    "ambiguous" widths like accented Latin characters with East Asian
    fonts. By default, Mercurial assumes ambiguous characters are
    narrow, set this variable to "wide" if such characters cause
    formatting problems.

HGMERGE
    An executable to use for resolving merge conflicts. The program
    will be executed with three arguments: local file, remote file,
    ancestor file.

    (deprecated, use configuration file)

HGRCPATH
    A list of files or directories to search for configuration
    files. Item separator is ":" on Unix, ";" on Windows. If HGRCPATH
    is not set, platform default search path is used. If empty, only
    the .hg/hgrc from the current repository is read.

    For each element in HGRCPATH:

    - if it's a directory, all files ending with .rc are added
    - otherwise, the file itself will be added

HGPLAIN
    When set, this disables any configuration settings that might
    change Mercurial's default output. This includes encoding,
    defaults, verbose mode, debug mode, quiet mode, tracebacks, and
    localization. This can be useful when scripting against Mercurial
    in the face of existing user configuration.

    Equivalent options set via command line flags or environment
    variables are not overridden.

HGPLAINEXCEPT
    This is a comma-separated list of features to preserve when
    HGPLAIN is enabled. Currently the following values are supported:

    ``alias``
        Don't remove aliases.
    ``i18n``
        Preserve internationalization.
    ``revsetalias``
        Don't remove revset aliases.
    ``templatealias``
        Don't remove template aliases.
    ``progress``
        Don't hide progress output.

    Setting HGPLAINEXCEPT to anything (even an empty string) will
    enable plain mode.

HGUSER
    This is the string used as the author of a commit. If not set,
    available values will be considered in this order:

    - HGUSER (deprecated)
    - configuration files from the HGRCPATH
    - EMAIL
    - interactive prompt
    - LOGNAME (with ``@hostname`` appended)

    (deprecated, use configuration file)

EMAIL
    May be used as the author of a commit; see HGUSER.

LOGNAME
    May be used as the author of a commit; see HGUSER.

VISUAL
    This is the name of the editor to use when committing. See EDITOR.

EDITOR
    Sometimes Mercurial needs to open a text file in an editor for a
    user to modify, for example when writing commit messages. The
    editor it uses is determined by looking at the environment
    variables HGEDITOR, VISUAL and EDITOR, in that order. The first
    non-empty one is chosen. If all of them are empty, the editor
    defaults to 'vi'.

PYTHONPATH
    This is used by Python to find imported modules and may need to be
    set appropriately if this Mercurial is not installed system-wide.