VIM Winget, feedback

[hummeleBop]

Hello there,

Thanks for this great step forward, vim is now available in winget and it's really nice.

Right now, it relies on the nsis version of the installer but there are several flaws:

1- In silent mode, shortcuts on the desktop are mandatory.

2- In silent mode, we cannot disable specific features.

3- Winget « --scope user » argument doesn't work.

4- There is no way to update (or uninstall) vim properly from winget.

I use the following command in order to install vim:

winget install --exact vim.vim --location c:\programs\vim

Thanks

[jcasale]

I'd love to archive my repo at jcasale/vim-msi and have this repo publish an MSI that could be used instead.

[chrisbra]

hm, not sure, can we integrate this here?

[jcasale]

Hi, sure you can. I added a workflow that is scheduled nightly to check your repo for releases and build an msi package.

You would only need to perform the following:

1. Remove all the initial steps that infer whether a release is due.
2. Remove all the conditions on the remaining steps based on the earlier logic.
3. Lastly, update the staging logic from fetching your artifact into my build root, to something local.

The benefit of my msi is that it uses vim itself to manipulate any settings in text files instead of a CPP or C# based custom action. As a result, you only need WIX to compile the MSI itself and nothing else and WIX is already installed in the Windows action container.

An MSI brings a significant advantage over the current installer.

[chrisbra]

@k-takata @brammool what do you think? would it make sense to get rid of the nullsoft installer and switch to an MSI installer? I think it could potentially also been more easy to integrate with signpath, IIRC, but other than that I have no opinion about this.

[brammool]

We would have to try it out to know for sure if using MSI works perfectly. Using the Nullsoft installer works quite well, with some disadvantages for a few users. Ideally we would have both installers for a little while and find out what works best. I suppose that won't be more work.