How to see Mercurial commands issued by Tortoise HG?

Question

I there a way to see what Mercurial commands are issued by Tortoise HG? For instance, if I use the Shelve command in Tortoise, I'd like to see how (and if) it calls 'hg shelve' under the hood.

Answer 1

You can only see the stderr if some command trigger a problem, by activating DEBUG_THG.

But as far as I know, there is no command log for TortoiseHg.

^{And TortoiseGit is not very strong on this feature either.}

Answer 2

In some tools, there's a "View->Always Show Output" option. It causes commands to run in a console window. Though often the displayed command line is truncated because it could contain passwords.

TortoiseHg uses Mercurial at multiple API layers, so there's no universal place to get all the commands it issues. But a couple print statements could get you pretty far.

tortoisehg/hgtk/hgcmd.py - in CmdRunner::execute(), print cmdline tortoisehg/util/hglib.py - in hgcmd_toq(), print args

To see print statements, you typically have to set THGDEBUG in your environment, and run hgtk with the --nofork option.

Shelve in particular is difficult to intercept, because nearly all of that code is internal to TortoiseHg. We have a local copy of the shelve extension and call into it directly.