How do I diff one branch with my default branch

Question

I switched to a branch on my local repo and noticed it gave me message showing x files updated. This surprised me as I didn\'t know there were any differences on that branch. H

Answer 1

Use hg diff -r BRANCH1:BRANCH2, where BRANCH1 and BRANCH2 are the names of the branches. This will show you the differences between the heads of the two branches.

You got the message about "x files updated" because there were files changed on the original branch, not necessarily because there were files changed on the other branch. Mercurial shows you the union of the sets of changed files from both branches.