Tortoise clients and icon overlay handlers

[Stefan Küng]

Hi,

Since there are now more than just one Tortoise client available, and 
many people have already more than just one installed, the limit of 
available icon overlay handlers becomes a real problem.

As you know, Windows only has 12 slots available for icon overlay 
handlers (the theoretical limit is 15, but 3 are already used by the OS 
itself). Which means if a user has more than one Tortoise client 
installed, the second one can't show all overlays anymore.

To solve this problem, I've implemented a common overlay handler for 
Tortoise clients. If all Tortoise clients would use this handler instead 
of the OS one, they would all use the same slots in the system and it 
doesn't matter anymore how many clients a user has installed.

To use this common overlay handler, all you have to do is to install the 
common handler (of course) and then register your own handlers under 
HKLM\Software\TortoiseOverlays\ instead of 
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\current 
version\explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers.

I've already implemented this change in TortoiseSVN, it's not much work.

The sourcecode is available from here (username: guest, leave password 
empty):
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/svn/tortoisesvn/TortoiseOverlays/version-1.0.1/
the installers and merge modules are in the /bin subfolder.

More information is available in the documentation file:
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/svn/tortoisesvn/TortoiseOverlays/version-1.0.1/Documentation.txt

The whole thing is 'license free' to avoid incompatibilities with the 
license of your own Tortoise client. Which means it's completely free to 
use, link to or whatever you like.

Stefan

P.S. If you're replying to this mail, don't forget to cc all recipients 
since this mail goes to different Tortoise mailing lists.

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