Windows installer - silent mode

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Michael Smith

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Mar 28, 2012, 8:23:48 AM3/28/12

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Hi,

From what I understand, the Windows installer (gvim73_46.exe) is built
using NSIS, and NSIS supports a "/S" flag to enable unattended installation.

It works, except that it still pops up a confirmation dialog at the
start: "This will install Vim 7.3 on your computer. Continue?"

Is there a way to suppress that dialog? I don't think it's needed even
for regular (not silent) installs, as the next screen in regular mode is
a license acceptance screen that makes it pretty clear you're going to
be installing Vim.

The NSIS MessageBox supports an "/SD" option (example here:
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Embedding_other_installers). Unfortunately,
this is something that has to be baked into the gvim.nsi - it can't be
changed from the command-line.

I'm trying to deploy Vim through Puppet running as a service, so the
confirmation dialog doesn't get shown and the installer hangs.

Thanks,
Mike

geoffr...@thomsonreuters.com

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Oct 3, 2012, 7:26:06 AM10/3/12

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I had a similar problem - in my case just push Vim install
files along with a batch file out to my Windows servers, the
user then runs the batch file and it installs Vim silently.
Probably too late for the OP but I thought I'd record my
solution.

Possibly the Vim without Cream install could do silent
install? I didn't want the default options there so I
didn't try it. (Some threads on the Cream website say they
haven't managed to make silent install with options work
properly for some NSIS-related reasons so you'd be stuck
with the defaults.)

I did find this promising looking link
https://github.com/gpwen/vim-installer-mui2/wiki/feature but
I'm not sure which Vim install packages it applies to, if
any. Didn't spend a great deal of time on it.

Anyway what I ended up doing was not using the install
packages, instead I downloaded the file packages from the
www.vim.org website then used the command line install tool
provided.

To be precise I got these files and unzipped them to form
the directory tree vim\vim73.

gvim73_46.zip
vim73_46rt.zip
vim73_46w32.zip

I then added vim\vimruntime with the config files I wanted.
(I also had to add diff.exe into vim\vim73 since they didn't
seem to come with it. I just used diff.exe from another
install.)

I then zipped it all up again and deploy that zip
file out onto my servers along with a batch file. The batch
file unzips the files to make C:\Program Files (x86)\vim\
with vim73 and vimruntime sub-directories, then runs this
command to do the installing (all one line):

call install.exe -install-popup -install-openwith -create-batfiles vim gvim evim view gview vimdiff gvimdiff