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Comment by p2detar | Hacker News Reader

Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield.

What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms.

It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2].

0 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page

1 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_i...

2 - https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis

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Yep, NSIS is awesome and my team is still using it to package Windows builds of at least two apps. I was pleasantly surprised to see Tauri [0] includes NSIS as one of its built-in installer options.

0 - https://tauri.app/ 1 - https://tauri.app/distribute/windows-installer/

My first IT job in the late aughts we had a small windows utility that came packaged in a zip file rather than an installer, and we wanted to deploy it across the network. I figured out what registry keys the .exe needed and created a NSIS installer that could be run silently, quickly, and remotely - fun stuff.

NDIS is extremely elegant and runs on just about every windows version. It also has plugin support for almost anything you can imagine. I used it for my concept project of building a re-usable installer for python modules: it takes the installers own file name as the input for what python module to install. So you can basically have a new installer for any python module just by renaming a file

https://github.com/robertsdotpm/win-auto-py3 (example exe points to resources on an old server i no longer have. so won't run but all the files and code are there and work.)

I wrote this when vibe coding wasn't a thing, could be a cool idea though to add mirror support for some resources the installer downloads and fallback to archive.org if hosts are down. That's one of the very cool things about NSIS -- everything you need for it already exists. Downloader, authentication, compression, all kinds of neat stuff. There's some many plugins for NSIS you could build working software just out of NSIS alone.

I worked with both Installshield and NSIS and vastly prefered the latter, it just got the job done.

I used to do the CodeWarrior installer for Freescale/NXP embedded product lines in the 2010s and InstallShield became completely unworkable as a tool for a massive dev tool. Even today, a 400MB+ installer is difficult, let alone in the age of mechanical HDDs.

I had to choose between NSIS and Wix - and while native installer formats were clearly the future even back then, the performance and compression advantages of NSIS were so great that it was a clear choice. Solid LZMA was simply impossible to beat by any deflate/zlib/mszip oriented tool.

The joy of the dev team was palpable, the new installer was about 60% smaller and installed in one third the time.

I did installer stuff for about ~10 years, mostly InstallShield, deep in the weeds with Windows Installer table editing and custom actions, and making the InstallScript engine do things it wasn't designed for.

These days, I would personally use NSIS for small stuff. Wix installer for anything bigger/more enterprisey. Last I checked SharpDevelop's WYSIWYG editor was pretty decent for Wix dialogs.

back in the days when i was doing windows desktop apps, this was the way. installshield was such a piece of hot enterprise garbage that felt like it was designed by management consultants. overengineered, way too complicated, way too many steps to do the simplest of things. it was literally a case study in how not to do software.

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