Mercurial allows you to customize output of commands through templates. You can either pass in a template from the command line, via the --template option, or select an existing template-style (--style). You can customize output for any "log-like" command: log, outgoing, incoming, tip, parents, heads and glog. Four styles are packaged with Mercurial: default (the style used when no explicit preference is passed), compact, changelog, and xml. Usage:: $ hg log -r1 --style changelog A template is a piece of text, with markup to invoke variable expansion:: $ hg log -r1 --template "{node}\n" b56ce7b07c52de7d5fd79fb89701ea538af65746 Strings in curly braces are called keywords. The availability of keywords depends on the exact context of the templater. These keywords are usually available for templating a log-like command: .. keywordsmarker The "date" keyword does not produce human-readable output. If you want to use a date in your output, you can use a filter to process it. Filters are functions which return a string based on the input variable. Be sure to use the stringify filter first when you're applying a string-input filter to a list-like input variable. You can also use a chain of filters to get the desired output:: $ hg tip --template "{date|isodate}\n" 2008-08-21 18:22 +0000 List of filters: .. filtersmarker