2. Introduction

2.1. What is TortoiseHg?

TortoiseHg is a set of graphical tools and a shell extension for the Mercurial distributed revision control system.

On Windows,
TortoiseHg consists of a shell extension, which provides overlay icons and context menus in your file explorer, and a command line program named hgtk.exe which can launch the TortoiseHg tools. Binary packages of TortoiseHg for Windows come with Mercurial and a merge tool and are thus completely ready for use “Out of the Box”.
On Linux,
TortoiseHg consists of a command line hgtk script and a Nautilus extension which provides overlays and context menus in your file explorer. You must have Mercurial installed separately in order to run TortoiseHg on Linux. TortoiseHg binary packages list Mercurial as a dependency, so it is usually installed for you automatically.

TortoiseHg is primarily written in Python and PyGtk (the Windows shell extension being the notable exception). The hgtk script and TortoiseHg dialogs can be used on any platform that supports PyGtk, including Mac OS X.

2.2. Installing TortoiseHg

2.2.1. On Windows

TortoiseHg comes with an easy to use installer. Double click on the installer file and follow the instructions. The installer will take care of the rest.

After installation a reboot is necessary.

Note

If you have an older (<0.8) version already installed, the installer will ask that you to remove the previous version of TortoiseHg. The uninstall can be initiated from the control panel or the start menu.

Note

If you have 0.8 or later already installed, the installer will close the ThgTaskbar application when it begins copying files.

2.2.1.1. Language settings

The TortoiseHg user interface has been translated into many languages. Language packs are not required since all available languages are installed. Look in C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\locale for the available languages. To enable a language just set the environment variable LANGUAGE to the desidered language, e.g. for italian set LANGUAGE=it.

Note

After setting LANGUAGE, if standard GUI elements like OK and Apply still appear in English, it means the TortoiseHg installer did not include translations of GTK+ for your locale. This usually means the translation of TortoiseHg for your locale was incomplete at release time.

The Windows shell extension context menus get their translations from the Windows registry. Translations for many locales were installed under C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\cmenu_i18n. Select the locale you would like to use, double-click on it, and confirm all requests.

2.2.2. On Linux and Mac

Debian DEB and RPM packages for Fedora are available on the download page of the wiki.

Deb packages for Ubuntu can be found at that.

For MacOSX, no packages are available but you can run hgtk and all the dialogs via the source install method. For details, see MacOSX.

2.2.2.1. Language settings

The TortoiseHg tools use Python’s gettext library to localize their text. To get localized dialogs, it is recommended that you set the LANGUAGE environment variable to your locale of choice.