Question

according to Mercurial’s commit help message:

If a list of files is omitted, all changes reported by "hg status" will be
committed.

Is there an easy way to change this behavior?

I’d like Mercurial not to commit any changes, unless the files are explicitly specified.

edit

I am on Linux and I am using the command line.

Answer 1

This seems to do the trick:

$ hg commit -X *  
nothing changed

It doesn’t do anything because all files are excluded, but if you give any files, those will be included.

You could alias it:

[alias]
xcommit = commit -X *

then:

$ hg status
M a
M b
$ hg xcommit -m 'no files specified'
nothing changed
$ hg xcommit -m 'picking a' a
$ hg status
M b

Personally I wouldn’t want to get used to this type of workflow. It’s usually just as easy to:

• work in smaller chunks so your changes reflect a single changeset
• for the times when you forget and you’re on a coding spree, use something like hg record
• for the really few times when the above two don’t fit, use -I/-X for that single commit