How to make Mercurial on Windows use an SSH key for push/pull?

Question

How to tell TortoiseHg (or Mercurial in general) that I want to use a given SSH key when pushing/pulling to/from a remote repository?

Answer 1

On Windows, see Accessing SSH-controlled repositories from a Windows client: you need PuTTY, plink and a particular config setting.

To put that in a particular repository, put in .hg/hgrc

[ui]
ssh="C:\path to\plink.exe" -ssh -i "C:\your path to\private.key"

Also note that you don't need to specify the key path if you use pageant.