These features are common to many TortoiseHg tools, so we document them here just once.
We define a few keyboard accelerators that all of the TortoiseHg tools support.
On Mac OS X, the apple (command) key is used as the modifier instead of Ctrl. However some keyboard accelerators are internal to GTK+ so you must use the control key to access cut-paste functionality, for instance.
Visual Diff Window
TortoiseHg 0.8 introduced a visual diff dialog that solves four usability issues:
Providing visual diffs requires TortoiseHg to generate temporary files which contain older versions of data. Those temporary files are deleted when the visual diff dialog is closed.
If you would like to bypass this visual diff window and directly launch your visual diff tool open the global settings dialog and set TortoiseHg ‣ Skip Diff Window to true.
Note
The Skip Diff Window configurable does not change the behavior of visual diffs launched by the shell context menu. The visual diff window is always shown.
Warning
When you bypass the visual diff window, your visual diff tool must be able to handle directory diffs and it must not fork a background process. Caveat emptor.
Configuring a visual diff application for use in TortoiseHg is a two step process. First you must configure your application as an Extdiff command in your user Mercurial.ini:
[extdiff]
myapp = C:\Path\to\tool.exe
Then you can select myapp from the list of available extdiff commands in TortoiseHg ‣ Visual Diff Command. See the Frequently Asked Questions for some configuration examples.
When more than one Extdiff command is configured, the visual diff window will allow you to select the command to use as you open each file.
Many TortoiseHg dialogs use treeviews to present lists of data to the user. The file lists in the status, commit, shelve, and changelog tools are treeviews. The changelog graph pane is a treeview. And even the annotate pane in the datamine tool is a treeview.
Most of the TortoiseHg treeviews are configured for live searches. Ensure that the treeview has focus (by clicking on a row), and begin typing a search phrase. A small entry window will appear containing the text you have typed, and the treeview will immediately jump to the first row that matches the text you have entered thus far. As you enter more characters, the search is refined.
Many TortoiseHg tools use the hgcmd dialog to execute Mercurial commands that could potentially be interactive.
Interactive Mercurial Command Dialog
Note
Error messages are given a dark red color for contrast
When the Mercurial command has completed, the dialog gives focus to its Close button. So pressing Enter is all that is required to close the window.