Yours .hgrcshould be in ~/.hgrc, as in other UNIX-like operating systems (provided that you use a standard Mercurial installation, and not something like MacHg). You can use /etc/mercurial, but in this case the file has a name hgrc, not .hgrc.
hg , :
$ hg help config
Configuration Files
Mercurial reads configuration data from several files, if they exist. Below we list the most specific file first.
On Unix, these files are read:
- "<repo>/.hg/hgrc"
- "$HOME/.hgrc"
- "/etc/mercurial/hgrc"
- "/etc/mercurial/hgrc.d/*.rc"
- "<install-root>/etc/mercurial/hgrc"
- "<install-root>/etc/mercurial/hgrc.d/*.rc"