How to Hide Inactive Branches by Default with Mercurial

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”.