diff --git a/contrib/win32/mercurial.ini b/contrib/win32/mercurial.ini
--- a/contrib/win32/mercurial.ini
+++ b/contrib/win32/mercurial.ini
@@ -3,6 +3,9 @@
 ; USERNAME is your Windows user name:
 ;   C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Mercurial.ini
 
+[ui] 
+editor = notepad
+
 ; By default, we try to encode and decode all files that do not
 ; contain ASCII NUL characters.  What this means is that we try to set
 ; line endings to Windows style on update, and to Unix style on