Running TortoiseGit in Mac and Linux using wine
TortoiseGit is a great GUI to handle your git projects through in use of contextual menu directly in the file explorer. It gives support for the most common git commands, it’s open source, it’s free and it requires no signing up. Nevertheless they give support only for Windows. Usually it’s not a big problem since it’s possible to run Windows programs in Mac and Linux using Wine. A tutorial about how to run Windows programs using wine may be found here. The problem arises with the contextual menu of TortoiseGit since it doesn’t connect with the file explorer of Mac. Does anybody know how to run TortoiseGit in Mac o Linux using wine and getting around of the contextual menu or invoke this menu in some other way using Wine? I know there are other Mac options for having a git GUI in Mac or Linux. But TortoiseGit is really great and I think it would be an advantage to have the same GUI for working in Windows as well for working in Mac or Linux since it wouldn’t be necessary to learn two GUIs. In addition, some Mac GUIs are not as complete as TortoiseGit UPDATE: wine no longer works with newer versions of OSX. Now the unique way to run tortoise in Mac would be to install windows in a virtual machine such as Virtualbox and access to your Mac folders using a network drive (it runs with widows 7 to save resources). The good new is that you will no longer have trouble in accessing to the contextual menu and all functions will work. The bad new is that icons in the file explorer won’t show because the mac directories will be accessed as a network drive. Of course you can know the changes in the directory using «check for modifications».
1. TortoiseGit isn’t an IDE at all. 2. TortoiseSVN is great but TortoiseGit IMHO keeps thinking the SVN way although it runs Git. Therefore I stopped using it even on Windows. There are better tools for Git.
@Melebius, could you please tell us which tools you know better that TortoiseGit for Windows as well for Mac?
I am OK with the default git gui and gitk and do the rest using command line. Since I haven’t been able to run these GUI tools on Mac OS X 10.6, I also discovered Sourcetree to be a viable alternative. It supports more operations but is slower.
In my opinion, TortoiseGit is unparalleled in many aspects, even in 2022. I had to switch to MacOS and dearly miss the old turtle. I’ve been using GitKraken for a while now, since it’s got a decent merge/rebase/conflict-resolving mechanism, but it can’t reach Tortoise in that regard. It lacks other Tortoise features like the repo browser where you can freely navigate branches, compare individual files across branches easily etc. I’ve tried the VS Code git client, SourceTree and GitKraken and I’d prefer Tortoise. (I do use git CLI mostly, but for complex tasks, I prefer to use a nice GUI)
TortoiseGit Manual
TortoiseGit runs on Windows 7 or higher. Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista 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, TortoiseGit 2.5 dropped support for Windows Vista).
If you encounter any problems during or after installing TortoiseGit please refer to Appendix A, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) first.
Installation
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 the section called “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.
Important
You need Administrator privileges to install TortoiseGit.
Language Packs
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. the section called “General Settings”).
Spell checker
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. By default the spell checker uses the same dictionary files as LibreOffice , OpenOffice.org and Mozilla . TortoiseGit can also use the spell checker shipped with Windows 8+. However, this needs to be enabled manually in advanced settings (key Win8SpellChecker ) at the moment.
The installer by default 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 the section called “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. When using the Windows spell checker, you need to install the dictionary in Windows first.
Or you can install the dictionaries yourself. If you have OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice 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 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/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.
- Check the tgit.projectlanguage setting. This setting can be set using TortoiseGit Settings Dialogs 3 page (the section called “TortoiseGit Dialog Settings 3”). Refer to git-config(1) man-page for information about setting properties (use the LCID Dec value as assigned by Microsoft).
- If no project language is set, or that language is not installed, try the language corresponding to the Windows locale.
- If the exact Windows locale doesn’t work, try the “ Base ” language, e.g. de_CH (Swiss-German) falls back to de_DE (German).
- If none of the above works, then the default language is English, which is included by default with the standard installation.
When using the Windows spell checker, this is tried first. If no Windows dictionary, based on these fallback-rules, could be found then the «old» spell checker is used as a fallback.
Download
For detailed info on what’s new, read the release notes.
Please make sure that you choose the right installer for your PC, otherwise the setup will fail.
| for 32-bit Windows | for 64-bit Windows | for ARM64 Windows |
| Download TortoiseGit 2.14.0.1 32-bit ( 18.4 MiB ) | Download TortoiseGit 2.14.0.1 64-bit ( 21.6 MiB ) | Download TortoiseGit 2.14.0.1 ARM64 ( 19.9 MiB ) |
Pre-Release Builds
Before reporting an issue, please check that your problem isn’t fixed in our latest preview release. Also see What to do if a crash happened?
The language packs contain no standalone localized version of TortoiseGit, you need TortoiseGit from above. Each language pack has a download size of 2-7 MiB.
| Language | Code | Completeness | 32-Bit | 64-Bit | ARM64 |
| Albanian | sq | 29 % | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.4 MiB ) |
| Bulgarian | bg | 49 % | Setup ( 3.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.0 MiB ) |
| Catalan | ca | 98 % | Setup ( 3.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.4 MiB ) |
| Chinese, simplified | zh_CN | 99 % | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.2 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) |
| Chinese, traditional | zh_TW | 97 % | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.2 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) |
| Czech | cs | 88 % | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) |
| Danish | da | 41 % | Setup ( 3.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.4 MiB ) |
| Dutch | nl | 84 % | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) |
| Finnish | fi | 42 % | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.3 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) |
| French | fr | 99 % | Setup ( 3.1 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.1 MiB ) |
| German | de | 99 % | Setup ( 5.6 MiB ) | Setup ( 7.1 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.6 MiB ) |
| Greek | el | 57 % | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 6.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) |
| Hebrew | he | 35 % | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) |
| Hungarian | hu | 49 % | Setup ( 3.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.4 MiB ) |
| Indonesian | id | 42 % | Setup ( 2.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.9 MiB ) |
| Italian | it | 72 % | Setup ( 3.1 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.6 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.1 MiB ) |
| Japanese | ja | 99 % | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.2 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) |
| Korean | ko | 83 % | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.2 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) |
| Lithuanian | lt | 31 % | Setup ( 3.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.1 MiB ) |
| Occitan | oc | 41 % | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) |
| Persian | fa | 46 % | Setup ( 3.1 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.1 MiB ) |
| Polish | pl | 81 % | Setup ( 3.7 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.2 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.8 MiB ) |
| Portuguese, Brazil | pt_BR | 96 % | Setup ( 3.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.9 MiB ) |
| Portuguese, Portugal | pt_PT | 48 % | Setup ( 3.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.0 MiB ) |
| Romanian | ro | 79 % | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) |
| Russian | ru | 98 % | Setup ( 3.2 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.7 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.3 MiB ) |
| Serbian cyrillic | sr | 43 % | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.1 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) |
| Serbian latin | sr@latin | 54 % | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.1 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.6 MiB ) |
| Slovak | sk | 58 % | Setup ( 3.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.5 MiB ) |
| Slovenian | sl | 35 % | Setup ( 3.7 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.2 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.7 MiB ) |
| Spanish | es | 92 % | Setup ( 3.0 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.0 MiB ) |
| Swedish | sv | 81 % | Setup ( 3.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.9 MiB ) |
| Tamil, India | ta_IN | 99 % | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.3 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) |
| Turkish | tr | 61 % | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.5 MiB ) |
| Ukrainian | uk | 66 % | Setup ( 3.9 MiB ) | Setup ( 5.4 MiB ) | Setup ( 3.9 MiB ) |
| Vietnamese | vi | 54 % | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) | Setup ( 4.3 MiB ) | Setup ( 2.8 MiB ) |
Other resources
Debug symbols, language dlls and other resources can be found on our dedicated download server: download.tortoisegit.org/tgit/2.14.0.0/.
Preview releases
The preview releases are built from the latest code that represents the cutting edge of the TortoiseGit development. This version is used by the TortoiseGit developers for their daily work (in the past these also were of good quality). Preview releases are provided on an irregular basis, however, w/o translations.
Older releases
Older releases are available here.
© 2015-2023 TortoiseGit and contributors; Patches, suggestions and comments for this web site are welcome on GitLab. Imprint/Privacy Policy