TortoiseHg in Vista 64-bit not showing the context menu

Question

I installed TortoiseHg (Mercurial) in my Vista 64-bit and the context menu is not showing up when I right click a file or folder. Is there any workaround for this problem?

Answer 1

Update: TortoiseHg 0.8 (released 2009-07-01) now includes both 32 and 64 bit shell extensions in the installer, and also works with Windows 7. The workaround described below is no longer necessary.

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A workaround to getting the context menus in Windows Explorer is buried in the TortoiseHg development mailing list archives. One of the posts provides this very handy tip on how to run 32-bit Explorer on 64-bit Windows:

TortoiseHG context menus will show up if you run 32-bit windows explorer; create a shortcut with this (or use Start > Run):

%Systemroot%\SysWOW64\explorer.exe /separate

(Source: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01055.html)

It works fairly well and is minimally invasive, but unfortunately this doesn't seem to make the icon overlays appear. I don't know of any workaround for that, but file status can still be viewed through TortoiseHg menu commands at least. All other TortoiseHg functionality seems intact.

The icon overlays are now working with TortoiseHg 0.6 in 32-bit explorer! Not sure if this is a new fix or if I had some misconfiguration in 0.5; regardless this means TortoiseHg is fully functional in 64-bit Windows.

Answer 2

In order to be able to use an extension in Explorer, the "bitness" of the extension needs to match the bitness of the operating system. This is because (at least under Windows) you can't load a 32-bit DLL into a 64-bit process -- or vice versa. If there's no 64-bit version of HgTortoise, then you can't use it with Explorer on a 64-bit Windows OS.