Using Mecurial command line with IDEA projects

Hi,

I am new to IDEA and have managed to setup a new project using Lua and Mercurial. I have a couple of questions.

Is it advisable or not to VC the .idea directory or the .iml file of my project. What are the pros and cons of doing so?

Second I configured some files to exclude using the VCS excludes in the project configuration, however, these excludes are not recognized by the hg commmand line. How do I have the excludes enabled for both IDEA and the hg command line.

thanks,

I am using IDEA 12 on MacOS 10.7.5

-louie