1.4. Installing TortoiseGit

TortoiseGit runs on Windows Vista or higher. Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP3 are no longer supported. If you are running such an old system, you can still use older, however unsupported, releases of TortoiseGit. Those can be found on the download server (TortoiseGit 1.7 dropped support for Windows 2000; TortoiseGit 1.9 dropped support for Windows XP).

If you encounter any problems during or after installing TortoiseGit please refer to Appendix A, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) first.

TortoiseGit comes with an easy to use installer. Double click on the installer file and follow the instructions. The installer will take care of the rest.

One prerequisite of TortoiseGit is that it requires an already installed (command line) Git client which provides a git.exe. Git for Windows is recommended (Cygwin and Msys2 Git also work, see Section 2.36.1, “General Settings” for configuration. Please note that Cygwin and Msys2 Git are not officially supported by TortoiseGit as the developers only use Git for Windows. Bug reports, however, are welcome). Installation of Git for Windows can be done with preselected options, however, no need to install the "Windows Explorer integration". If you know about CRLF and LF line endings and you have editors coping with that, you should select "Checkout as-is, commit as-is" in order to prevent automatic translations.

The TortoiseGit user interface has been translated into many different languages, so you may be able to download a language pack to suit your needs. You can find the language packs on our translation status page . And if there is no language pack available yet, why not join the team and submit your own translation ;-)

Each language pack is packaged as a .msi installer. Just run the install program after the installation of the main TortoiseGit package and follow the instructions. After the installation finishes, the translation will be available and can be selected in settings dialog (cf. Section 2.36.1, “General Settings”).

TortoiseGit includes a spell checker which allows you to check your commit log messages. This is especially useful if the project language is not your native language. The spell checker uses the same dictionary files as LibreOffice , OpenOffice and Mozilla .

The installer automatically adds the US English dictionary. If you want other languages, the easiest option is simply to install one of TortoiseGit's language packs (see Section 1.4.3, “Language Packs”). This will install the appropriate dictionary files as well as the TortoiseGit local user interface. After the installation finishes, the translation will be available.

Or you can install the dictionaries yourself. If you have OpenOffice or Mozilla installed, you can copy those dictionaries, which are located in the installation folders for those applications. Otherwise, you need to download the required dictionary files from http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries/ or http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

Once you have got the dictionary files, you probably need to rename them so that the filenames only have the locale chars in it. Example:

Then just copy them into the %APPDATA%\TortoiseGit\dic folder. If that folder isn't there, you have to create it first. TortoiseGit will also search the Languages sub-folder of the TortoiseGit installation folder (normally this will be C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit\Languages); this is the place where the language packs put their files. However, the %APPDATA%-folder doesn't require administrator privileges and, thus, has higher priority. The next time you start TortoiseGit, the spell checker will be available.

If you install multiple dictionaries, TortoiseGit uses these rules to select which one to use.