No response to hg status after init on a new repo

[Harry Putnam]

I fell off using mercurial for a good number of months and it seems
I've forgotten what ever little bit I had learned.

Starting a new repo and working from the Quick start at:
   https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/QuickStart

It appears to be saying after doing `init' on new collection of
files.  One should create and test an .hgignore file.

The Quck Start (`qs' here after) tells me to test the .hgignore by
calling `hg status' claims it will `show all unignored files'.

But when I call `hg status' nothing what-so-ever happens.

To recap.... I've called `hg init' on a collection of files from the
base directory. I've done nothing else (except create .hgignore) but
when I call `hg status' nothing at all happens.

I thought maybe I'd left an extraneous asterisk (*) in the glob
section of .hgignore but no... .hgignore contains:

## editor leavings
syntax: glob
*~
.*~
*#*
.*#*
*.bak
.*.bak
.*sw[op]
 
I tried calling `hg add` and then `hg status'.  Still nothing.

I went a bit further and called hg commit -c "" .. it returns `nothing
is changed'

OK, so I add several new files and called hg status ... no response.

hg commit .. `nothing is changed'

This can't be the expected behavior... can it?

Has mercurial changed its behavior and the qs is just out of date.. or
is there likely to be something wrong at my end?

cd repo
  find .|wc -l
  908