With Mercurial migration by the NetBeans project in the pipeline, I wanted to know if NetBeans 6.0 has support for Mercurial repositories. Good news, it does! Here’s how to install Mercurial support under NetBeans 6.0.

Mercurial support in NetBeans v6.0 is already available but is not installed by default. Here are the steps to install Mercurial support in NetBeans v6.0.

For NetBeans under Windows XP:

1. Go to the Mercurial web site and download the binary package installer for your Windows XP system. The current Mercurial plugin for NetBeans 6.0 supports Mercurial version 0.94. Note: I tried installing Mercurial version 0.95 (the latest release) and 0.94 + fixes but when starting up NetBeans, I get a message that the Mercurial 0.94 is the one supported by the plugin. In order to avoid unnecessary risks, I finally installed version 0.94 of Mercurial.
2. In the NetBeans version 6.0 IDE, go to “Tools / Plugins” and click on the “Available” tab. Select “Mercurial” and then click “Install” to download and install the plugin.
3. After download and installing the Mercurial plugin, restart NetBeans. You should now have the “Mercurial” menu under the Versioning menu of the NetBeans 6.0 IDE.

For NetBeans under Ubuntu Linux v7.10 :

1. First you need to install the Mercurial package for Ubuntu. To install the package, open a terminal window under Ubuntu and issue the command:$ sudo apt-get install mercurialIt will install Mercurial version 0.94 on your Ubuntu 7.10.
2. Open up the NetBeans IDE and go to “Tools / Plugins” and click on the “Available” tab. Select “Mercurial” and then click “Install” to download and install the plugin.
3. After download and installing the Mercurial plugin, restart NetBeans. You should now have the “Mercurial” menu under the Versioning menu of the NetBeans 6.0 IDE.

The Mercurial plugin was created by John Rice and Padraig O’Brian. You can read more about the plugin at the Mercurial Version Control Plugin home page.