So, this morning I finally entertained Tortoise’s incessant whining to update to its latest version (1.5.2) and I took the plunge. The one thing that annoys me the most about the upgrade process is the fact I have to restart the machine in order for the installation to finish, this I find is so archaic and out of date compared to 99% of all other software installation. (Obviously I’m not stupid enough to realise that there’s quite a bit of interaction on the OS level with Tortoise, but still, it’s one annoyance I would rather do without)

Once I’m restarted and on the go again, I go to browse one of my SVN directories and I’m greeted with some disgusting icons. They’ve gone and replaced the XPStyle icon set with some… quite frankly, god awful ones. They blur horribly at 16×16 size and just don’t look nice at all in my opinion, so it was then finding out how to change the icons.

  1. Right click on the desktop and in “TortoiseSVN” click “Settings”
  2. Select “Icon Set” from the left tree menu
  3. Then using the drop down to change to which icon set suits you.
  4. Restart the machine (*sigh*)
After I had looked through the other sets I went for “Straight”, however after a days work with this, I just wanted the original icons back. Thankfully I had an old installation of TortoiseSVN on another machine so it was just a case of moving & renaming the icons from one place to another.
To get the old icons from 1.4.x into 1.5.x simply download the following file, and extract the folder into…
%commonprogramfiles%\TortoiseOverlays\icons
You can just put that into the Run box and it should load up the correct directory. Simple extract the zip file into here and then use the step-by-step above to change your icon set to the new one named “LegacyStyle”.