mercurial usually shows inactive branches when running “hg branches” but that’s kind of annoying if you have lots of old inactive branches. So I recently set up my personal .hgrc to hide inactive branches by creating an alias.

[alias]
branches = branches -a

Normally you get this kind of output.

ian@laptop:~/src/prj$ hg branches
default                     1662:1fa310d3052a
hoge                        1661:62d737e7146e
hoge_inactive               1623:ba27ba59a257 (inactive)
hoge_closed                 670:1c3134ca4a95 (closed)

But after setting up the alias inactive branches aren’t shown.

ian@laptop:~/src/prj$ hg branches
default                     1662:1fa310d3052a
hoge                        1661:62d737e7146e

This way though there isn’t a good way to show all branches if you have set up an alias so you might want to give the alias a different name like “abranches” for “active branches” so that you can show all branches by using “hg branches”.