{"slug": "darcs", "name": "Darcs", "category": "git", "category_name": "Git and code hosting", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 7, "warners": 1, "score": 2.605, "rising": -1.31, "first": "2025-11-30", "latest": "2026-07-14", "why": "I love darcs! Somehow its interface just vibes with me.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 3, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I love darcs! Somehow its interface just vibes with me.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "darcs.net", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://darcs.net", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Darcs", "darcs"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 782459712, "item_id": 48903732, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903732", "by": "black_knight", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love darcs! Somehow its interface just vibes with me.", "excerpt": "I love darcs! Somehow its interface just vibes with me. It is interactive by default, and the commands like \u201crecord\u201d, \u201crollback\u201d, etc, are somehow intuitive. Darcs also tried to put more semantic content in the patches, like file operations or search replace parches. It is always satisfying to rename something, then merge in some work where someone used the old variable name in the meanwhile, and the merge would go t", "context": "", "use_case": "version control", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Git history command deserves more attention"}, {"id": 777206048, "item_id": 48575378, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48575378", "by": "F3nd0", "date": "2026-06-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Also some older but still kicking alternatives", "excerpt": "Also some older but still kicking alternatives: * https://darcs.net/ * https://mercurial-scm.org/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Epic Games announces Lore version control system"}, {"id": 763624338, "item_id": 47726521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726521", "by": "johnisgood", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I like darcs", "excerpt": "I like darcs, so I am rooting for pijul. https://pijul.com", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"}, {"id": 739956432, "item_id": 46247277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247277", "by": "toastal", "date": "2025-12-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Darcs by it\u2019s nature can just be hosted by HTTP server too", "excerpt": "Darcs by it\u2019s nature can just be hosted by HTTP server too, but without needing a special tool. I use H2O with a small mruby script to throttle IPs.", "context": "", "use_case": "Version control", "switched_from": "", "story": "Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 763777473, "item_id": 47736092, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736092", "by": "WolfeReader", "date": "2026-04-11", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I deliberately moved away from Darcs after a few years", "excerpt": "Speaking as a former Darcs user (Darcs is another patch-based VCS that Pijul draws inspiration from): \"This is a useless property because the graph is only encoded at the patch layer. In the real world you have far more semantic dependencies than patch dependencies. ie, I have a patch that adds a function that calls a function added in another patch. Pijul doesn't know about that.\" Darcs solved this in two different ", "context": "Former Darcs user, has worked on three teams with rebase problems", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pijul a FOSS distributed version control system"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["version control"], "compared": [{"slug": "git", "name": "Git", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "mercurial", "name": "Mercurial", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pijul", "name": "Pijul", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "fossil", "name": "Fossil", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48901010", "title": "The Git history command deserves more attention", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571081", "title": "Epic Games announces Lore version control system", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672941", "title": "Pijul a FOSS distributed version control system", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712656", "title": "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169518", "title": "Show HN: Deff \u2013 side-by-side Git diff review in your terminal", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022238", "title": "Git is a file system. We need a database for the code", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 782459712, "item_id": 48903732, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903732", "by": "black_knight", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love darcs! Somehow its interface just vibes with me.", "excerpt": "I love darcs! Somehow its interface just vibes with me. It is interactive by default, and the commands like \u201crecord\u201d, \u201crollback\u201d, etc, are somehow intuitive. Darcs also tried to put more semantic content in the patches, like file operations or search replace parches. It is always satisfying to rename something, then merge in some work where someone used the old variable name in the meanwhile, and the merge would go t", "context": "", "use_case": "version control", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Git history command deserves more attention"}, {"id": 777206048, "item_id": 48575378, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48575378", "by": "F3nd0", "date": "2026-06-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Also some older but still kicking alternatives", "excerpt": "Also some older but still kicking alternatives: * https://darcs.net/ * https://mercurial-scm.org/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Epic Games announces Lore version control system"}, {"id": 763777473, "item_id": 47736092, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736092", "by": "WolfeReader", "date": "2026-04-11", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I deliberately moved away from Darcs after a few years", "excerpt": "Speaking as a former Darcs user (Darcs is another patch-based VCS that Pijul draws inspiration from): \"This is a useless property because the graph is only encoded at the patch layer. In the real world you have far more semantic dependencies than patch dependencies. ie, I have a patch that adds a function that calls a function added in another patch. Pijul doesn't know about that.\" Darcs solved this in two different ", "context": "Former Darcs user, has worked on three teams with rebase problems", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pijul a FOSS distributed version control system"}, {"id": 763624338, "item_id": 47726521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726521", "by": "johnisgood", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I like darcs", "excerpt": "I like darcs, so I am rooting for pijul. https://pijul.com", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"}, {"id": 754853905, "item_id": 47178369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178369", "by": "toastal", "date": "2026-02-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "darcs diff --diff-command=\"kitten diff %1 %2\"", "excerpt": "kitty terminal has diff like this builtin https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/diff/ I use it with darcs diff --diff-command=\"kitten diff %1 %2\"", "context": "", "use_case": "version control", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Deff \u2013 side-by-side Git diff review in your terminal"}, {"id": 752603442, "item_id": 47037715, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037715", "by": "WorldMaker", "date": "2026-02-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I still don't think darcs has the proposed character-based patch type.", "excerpt": "In my investigations ages ago [1] I felt the trick was to go lower that an AST. ASTs by nature generally have to be language-aware and vary so much from language to language that trying to generally diff them is rough. I didn't solve the language-aware part, but I did have some really good luck with using tokenizers intended for syntax highlighting. Because they are intended for syntax highlighting they are fast, eff", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Git is a file system. We need a database for the code"}, {"id": 739956432, "item_id": 46247277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247277", "by": "toastal", "date": "2025-12-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Darcs by it\u2019s nature can just be hosted by HTTP server too", "excerpt": "Darcs by it\u2019s nature can just be hosted by HTTP server too, but without needing a special tool. I use H2O with a small mruby script to throttle IPs.", "context": "", "use_case": "Version control", "switched_from": "", "story": "Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers"}, {"id": 737665248, "item_id": 46104078, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46104078", "by": "lioeters", "date": "2025-11-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "On their home page they have links to some repositories", "excerpt": "On their home page they have links to some repositories (or equivalent term) on a couple of Darcs hosts. https://hub.darcs.net https://smeder.ee Here's a recent discussion about Darcs, it's the first I've heard of it. Darcs, Friendly Version Control - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43022059 (9 months ago | 76 comments)", "context": "", "use_case": "Version control", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating Dillo from GitHub"}]}