best practices in mercurial: branch vs. clone, and partial merges?

Question

...so I\'ve gotten used to the simple stuff with Mercurial (add, commit, diff) and found out about the .hgignore file (yay!) and have

Answer 1

I have another option for you to look into: mercurial queues.

The idea is, to have a stack of patches (no commits, "real" patches) ontop of your current working directory. Then, you can add or remove the applied patches, add one, remove it, add another other one, etc. One single patch or a subset of them ends up to be a new "feature" as you probably want to do with branches. After that, you can apply the patch as usual (since it is a change). Branches are probably more useful if you work with somebody else... ?