************
Introduction
************

.. module:: introduction
	:synopsis: Introduce TortoiseHg and its various parts

What is TortoiseHg?
===================

TortoiseHg is a set of graphical tools and a shell extension for the
`Mercurial <http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/>`_ 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 :file:`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.


Installing TortoiseHg
=====================

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.


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 :file:`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 :guilabel:`OK`
	and :guilabel:`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 :file:`C:\\Program Files\\TortoiseHg\\cmenu_i18n`.  Select the
locale you would like to use, double-click on it, and confirm all
requests.

On Linux and Mac
----------------

Debian DEB and RPM packages for Fedora are available on the
`download <http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/wiki/download/>`_
page of the wiki.

Deb packages for Ubuntu can be found at
`that <https://launchpad.net/~tortoisehg-ppa>`_.

For MacOSX, no packages are available but you can run hgtk and all the
dialogs via the source install method. For details, see
`MacOSX <http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/wiki/MacOSX>`_.

Language settings
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The TortoiseHg tools use Python's
`gettext <http://docs.python.org/library/gettext.html>`_ library to
localize their text.  To get localized dialogs, it is recommended that
you set the LANGUAGE environment variable to your locale of choice.

.. vim: noet ts=4
