TortoiseHg: Overlay icon issues (Windows)?

Question

My TortoiseHg Windows explorer overlay icons are often in the wrong state for unknown reasons. In order to fix this I need to update icons on the folder, which I cant seem to do for multiple folders at once.

This is annoying as I am often working on a large number of projects at once and would like to be able to rely on TortoiseHg to help me figure out which projects need commits.

Does anyone else see the same issues? Has anyone figured anything out to eliminate or alleviate the problem?

Panchromatic

I've given up hope of reliable icon overlays in any of the Tortoise apps (git,hg,svn). I now exclusively use the TortoiseHg workbench and occasional hg command to track what files have been changed. I love how the workbench shows the state of the working copy and the revision history in the save window. I use it for commiting as well. I rarely use the shell menu for anything but launching the workbench. The only downside is that you have to manually refresh the view. I know this doesn't really solve the multiple projects issue, but it is what I have had to settle on. – Trip

Answer 1

I usually keep a command-line open at repository root to do a quick hg st or even better thg stat to get visual overview on what needs to be committed, if there's any. In addition thg commit allows you to cherry pick what you want to commit and see their diffs on the fly. Relying on icons and browsing folders one by one is cumbersome and prone to human errors.

Brynhild

Well, didn't answer my question but is probably the most helpful answer for anyone else who happens upon this. – Panchromatic

Answer 2

Can you check this post out and see if it helps? There's a limit to the number of overlays Windows will support.

TortoiseSVN icons not showing up under Windows 7

Ptolemaic

They show up, but they are wrong. Sometimes when I have uncommitted changes it says I don't and vice versa. – Panchromatic

Answer 3

I know this behaviour, but I don't mind / don't care.
I rarely look at the overlay icons at all, I have the Workbench open anyway and do everything in there.

It all depends on one's point of view.
For you, TortoiseHg's behaviour is annoying because you want to rely on the overlay icons.
The other extreme is (was?) TortoiseSvn. When I last used it (about two years ago), it had a resource-hogging background process that was updating all the icons all the time.
That was annoying for me at the time, because it visibly slowed down my machine (yes, you could change this somewhere in the settings, but the default setting was the resource-hogging one).

No matter how they do it, someone will always complain :-)

Housewifely

I can understand your point of view - that it slows down the system unnecessary if you don't want to rely on the overlay icons, but why would they display icons in the first place, if they are not up to date... then I'd prefer a setting to have up to date icons or none. – Albin

A less descriptive set of icons to indicate that "these files are being tracked" would be a useful middle ground between "no icons" and "up to date icons". (That's also the net effect of having detailed icons that aren't updated regularly.) – Nikolenikoletta

Answer 4

You can disable and enable the overlays in the Icon tab of the TortoiseHg Shell configuration, which worked for me

Cogan