If PyCharm complains that it Can't start Mercurial: /usr/bin/hg Probably the path to hg executable is not valid, then check if running hg from the command line triggers a problem running a certain extension. In my case I had a version of keyring and mercurial_keyring that did not play nice with each other. After upgrading these to 3.0.5 and 0.6.0 respectively, the problem went away. I guess PyCharm tests the run of the hg binary and if the shell return code (echo $?) is something other than 0 will show this warning.