A glimpse into a smoother version control experience

Distributed version control has been around for 20 years and revolutionized the way developers collaborate with each other. One of these revolutions is the ability to edit your commits, to simplify code review and empower the project history. However some of these features are still viewed as arcane or dangerous by a share of the population, sometimes for good reasons.

For the past 15 years, the Mercurial VCS has been building on a set of features, called "changeset evolution" to make history rewriting more accessible and safer. Newer tools like Jujutsu or Sapling have shaped their user experience around parts of these features.

In this lighting talk, we won't dive into a full explanation, but simply unroll a simple scenario showing how simple commands you use everyday can be made more powerful, smoothing your day-to-day workflow, giving you a glimpse into what version control can be.