Setting up TortoiseHg Workbench on the/my SteamDeck. IIRC the Deck will wipe/reset on major OS re-releases … so this is good to have around.

I randomly opened a post to copy the hugo header from. Weirdly, it was this one from the same date two years ago.

Update 2026-02-09

λ yay -S masterpdfeditor got me a .pdf tool that can see my fancy DnD5e character sheet!

yay TortoiseHg Workbench (on SteamDeck)

TortoiseHg’s Workbench is the GUI for dVCS - nothing else comes close. People like to argue that git is better than CVS, so, git is better … and they’re dumb and wrong and arguing about things unrelated to what I just said.

The SteamDeck uses SteamOS an Arch Linux derivative, which is not-quite default for most package managers. This is FINE because the purpose of SteamOS isn’t to be a desktop workstation, but, to be a nice throne from which to launch Steam.

Getting Mercurial itself running was fine, but, I remain convinced the GUI is faster for that vial human element. I needed to install/assemble/build TortoiseHg to get the workbench and fully migrate from my old clanker to the Steam Deck for indie¹ work.

I think that hg was just λ sudo flatpak install flathub org.mercurial.hg but in hindsight … I’d stick with just the contents of this post for future reinstalls.

Here’s how I did that, using something called yay, which is now happily living on my Deck as well.

Install yay?

At time of writing, I don’t know what yay is, so, let’s go “research monkey” … well, it seems that …

• Yet another Yogurt - An AUR Helper written in Go?²
• Yogurt: Yet another AUR tool³
• The Arch User Repository (AUR) is a community-driven repository for Arch Linux users.⁴

Neat.

after a @what a package@ it installed, i think the full dev/path weas this;

Installing yay!

The basic instructions are …

λ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
λ cd yay
λ makepkg -si

… but this doesn’t work on the/my stock SteamOS because it needs a bunch of extra stuff. Install these packages …

• base-devel
• gcc
• git
• glibc
• go
• libarchive
• linux-api-headers
• linux-headers
• pacman

… which can be done with the command …

λ sudo pacman -S base-devel gcc git glibc go libarchive linux-api-headers linux-headers pacman

… after which, re-run λ makepkg -si in your yay working copy and the tool should install fine. I think you can then delete the working copy of yay just fine.

Now install ToirtoisHG

λ yay -S tortoisehg

That’s it - many prompts came up, but, that was it.

Remember to;

• setup your public/private key
• connect to new hosts by shell to get authorized_keys setup
• set File > Settings > global settings > TortoishHG > Shell to be konsole to get the prettier terminal