TortoiseHg
Mercurial GUI in Developer tools
A free graphical front end for Mercurial, praised for its good interface and Windows Explorer integration. One commenter reports bitrot on a current Linux distro.
9 people recommended TortoiseHg in Hacker News comments and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
5 of the 9 people who recommend it commented in one thread, “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]”.
Summary written by Claude from 10 comments.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- mixed feelings
- 0
- warn against or regret it
- 1
The record
Recommended in 3 of 12 months
In 6 different threads.
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
- Recommended in 6 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- 5 of its 9 recommenders came from one threadNeeds half or less, not met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 10 of the 12 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good graphical interface
“It also has TortoiseHg which is a great GUI front end.”
Comment from 1 Dec 2025 in “GitHub to Codeberg: my experience” “The Tortoisehg GUI is good for doing reviews”
Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Before GitHub” “a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “GitHub Stacked PRs” - Comment from 17 May 2026 in “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]”
- Comment from 17 May 2026 in “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]”
Windows Explorer integration
“The thing I really liked about it was TortoiseHg, which provides integration between Mercurial and Windows Explorer.”
Comment from 17 May 2026 in “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]” “particularly TortoiseHg integration on Windows”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control”
What people said
10 of the 12 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“It had a much better GUI in 2009 (THG”
“It also had an excellent GUI (thg”
“TortoiseHG is a very good client that covers all common Mercurial operations and then some.”
“The thing I really liked about it was TortoiseHg, which provides integration between Mercurial and Windows Explorer.”
“particularly TortoiseHg integration on Windows”
“The Tortoisehg GUI is good for doing reviews”
“a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg”
“on my current distro its showing some bitrot”
“I'm able to use TortoiseHG from any machine to easily stage commits”
“It also has TortoiseHg which is a great GUI front end.”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.