When using Mercurial HG, how to just get the latest code?

Once you cloned a repository, to get the code of the "tip" (the last version of the current branch - the default one if not precised) you just need to update.

You have an update action in TortoiseHG. Once done, you can look at the files in the folder.

If you wanted another state of the repository (an old version, or an old tagged state) then it's still the update command, with other parametters (see the docs or the TortoiseHG interface).

In short, no.

In a bit longer: Mercurial doesn't yet support “shallow” clones where you only get part of the history. So each time you clone you pull in the entire repository with all changesets.

Additionally, unlike Subversion, there is no way to make a “narrow” clone where you only checkout a portion of a repository. For example, if a repository has directories foo/ and bar/, there is no way to get only the bar/ directory. In other words, Mercurial always operates on project-wide snapshots.

The easiest way to achieve what you want:

hg archive [destination folder]

If you only want the latest code, and you don't intend to do anything related to the repository with it, like commit, or diff to older versions, or whatever, then you it depends on where you got the code from and how.

If he is using one of the hosting services, like bitbucket, there's usually a download link which gives you just the source code.

For instance, if you go here, there's a "Get source" link up and to the right which gives you a few choices in the file format (zip or whatnot.)

If you got the files somewhere else, you need to explore the interface you got them from. Try just pasting the link you cloned from into your browser and see what you get.