mercurial/help/templates.txt

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