TW-17630, TW-18815 fix encoding for hg log command Mercurial stores commit messages in UTF-8. During commit it tries to guess a system encoding and transcode message from system encoding to UTF-8. When it prints to output it transcodes from UTF-8 to the system encoding and replace characters which cannot be represented in the system encoding with the symbol of '?'. Default console encoding on windows is cp437, and it cannot represent non-latin symbols, see http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CharacterEncodingOnWindows for details. The fix is to not use a console to run hg, and tell mercurial to do the output in UTF-8.