I have not finished the game yet, so it's always possible this may break something in a part I have yet to play, or a part that I already completed prior to doing this. I'll update this guide with more information when I know for sure.

EDIT: I have beaten the game, and ran into no issues. In addition, my brother has been playing on my computer with this same tweak enabled, and he hasn't run into any issues either. I don't remember where exactly I was in the game when I started playing with this tweak, but I feel like it was somewhere in chapter 4, which he's already past.

First, open the HL:A installation directory. To do this, right-click the game in your Steam library, go to "Manage" and click "Browse local files". A folder window will open.

Open the "game" folder, then "hlvr", then "cfg". Do not open any other folders unless you're okay with knowing in advance (or you already know) the names of all the maps in the game.

Open Notepad, and paste in the following text:


Save the document in that "cfg" folder, and call it "free_pull.cfg". Make sure you DO include the quotes when typing in the name.

Right-click the game in Steam once more, and click Properties. Click "Set Launch Options...", and type:
(The "-novid" part is optional and has nothing to do with the gravity gloves; it will make the game skip the Valve logo. Leave it off if you don't want this.)

Click OK, launch the game, and try it out. If you jerk your hand to the side instead of toward you, it should pull things sideways instead. This will have less of an effect with objects that are farther away. I think this is a pretty nice quality-of-life change. If you don't like it and want to go back to the default settings, just remove the "+exec free_pull.cfg" from the launch options.

Here's what the values in the file mean, in case you want to adjust it more to your liking:

• vr_hand_pull_acceleration_max: When you grab an object, it applies a force to it to make it move to your hand. The higher this value, the stronger this force is. The default is 500; I've found setting it to 100 works well.
  
• vr_hand_pull_angle_far: 0-90, in degrees. You may have noticed it already applied a bit of force in the direction you moved your hand. This sets the maximum angle at which this can happen for distant objects. 0 means it will ignore the direction and always act as if you pulled it toward you; 90 means it can go up to 90 degrees to the side. I have it set to 45, as for farther objects it's more likely I want to move it toward me.
  
• vr_hand_pull_angle_near: Same as above, except this is for nearby objects. I have this set to 90, of course.
  
• vr_hand_pull_angle_far_distance: The distance at which objects should be considered far away for purposes of the above variables.
  
• vr_hand_pull_angle_near_distance: Similar to above, the distance for nearby objects. I'm pretty sure that objects between this and the far distance have the angle set to a value proportionally in between.

If you want to experiment, add the following to the launch options:
Then press ~ on your keyboard while in-game. You can type in the names of these parameters and their values, exactly the same as in the lines in the config file, and see the results without having to restart the game. You can also type:
in the console, and it will show you visually how it calculates the trajectory.

Enjoy!