I often browse sourceforge and download the source files of things that look interesting to me, however there are quite a few VCS systems that I have seen in use on there, and I don't want to download the required software for each VCS, just so I can download the files.
Except for manually creating the folders and downloading the individual files one a time from the web VCS viewer, how can I download these repositories without the software?
Thanks.
Typically, Sourceforge projects provide source packages that you can download (usually in tarball or zip format). These source packages generally correspond to numbered releases, so they won't always have the very latest code that is checked into version control.
If you want to keep up with the very latest source code that's checked in but not yet released into a distribution file, I can't think of any better method than downloading the code with the corresponding VCS.
I'm also wondering why you are reluctant to install VCS software. Sourceforge doesn't support that many different flavours. The site documentation says "Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, CVS" which are all widely available and well-supported.