Installer vs. zip in WIndows 10

Terry R

This post is deleted!

Victorel Petrovich

@PeterJones
That “To sum up” part is very useful information for any user to understand differences Installer vs Portable,
and would be good to be put in the user manual , in section https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/getting-started/ .

Perhaps adding another important difference (obvious for more advanced users) that Installer is for users with admin rights/password.

mkupper

I agree with @Victorel-Petrovich that there should be more in the manual about why the difference versions, including the minimalist one, exist and potential behavioral issues.

One issue is that it’s not clear if @donho has clearly defined the differences. It may well be that some of the observed differences, such as copying a portable version into %ProgramFiles% causes Notepad++.exe to ignore doLocalConf.xml were accidents and not by design. Is the same behavior true for %ProgramFiles(x86)%?

FWIW, a good reason for not running the portable version as “portable” in either ProgramFiles folder is that normal users don’t have write rights to the folder. The portable version expects to have write rights. That may be well why the Notepad++.exe ignores doLocalConf.xml and uses %AppData% which the user has write rights to. Is this ignoring doLocalConf.xml because the .exe is in a ProgramFiles folder or is it because it’s in some random folder that it does not have write rights to? We can test and discover this but is that a baked in design choice or an accident?

PeterJones

@mkupper , @Victorel-Petrovich ,

please see User Manual issue and draft pull request for my suggested implementation. Feel free to comment there with improvements.

PeterJones

@mkupper

One issue is that it’s not clear if @donho has clearly defined the differences

Looking at this code, it is intentional (though maybe no longer applicable; I doubt he’s checked again on Win8 or later).

mkupper

@PeterJones said in Installer vs. zip in WIndows 10:

@mkupper

One issue is that it’s not clear if @donho has clearly defined the differences

Looking at this code, it is intentional (though maybe no longer applicable; I doubt he’s checked again on Win8 or later).

Thank you. The code looks good. There are some weird edge cases such if on an x64 system if you install an x32 version of Notepad++ in the x64 folder and try to make that installation a doLocalConf.xml portable installation then it would work as you wanted but for the wrong reason…