The mercurial project owners have dedicated windows installers for mercurial so installing on windows is pretty easy. If you have used subversion you will more than likely be familiar with TortoiseSVN the integrated subversion client for windows explorer. TortoiseHg is the mercurial equivalent of TortoiseSVN and can be downloaded directly from the mercurial download website for 32bit or 64bit platforms.

The file you download is a standard windows installer that will setup TortoiseHg for you.

Once installed you will get the Mercurial menu options available in the windows explorer context menu, shown above running side by side with TortoiseSVN. Don’t forget to add your TortoiseHg directory to your path so that you can use Mercurial from the command line. Remember to turn off windows indexing for your development folders as performance can be greatly affected. Right click on your top level development folder and on the general tab click –> Advanced and uncheck “Allow files in this folder to have contents indexed…”.

If you are going to be part of a team that needs to use their own local private Mercurial repository be sure to take a look at Part 3 – Installing a Mercurial Server.

You can sign up for a free bitbucket account at http://www.bitbucket.org, the free Mercurial hosting service which will allow you to share your code and follow progress of other Mercurial projects.