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.

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.

… as in work independent of the/a my day job aka “INDIE”

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