Proper path integration for all OS binaries

[Daeraxa]

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• [X] Completed

Summary

Commands missing from path

See here for Discord conversation.

Basically we should provide a solution to the various packages to make sure that the Pulsar and PPM commands can always be found on the path.

For example if you currently download the Appimage the only way to get the pulsar command working is to include it on the path manually even if integrated with appimageinstaller. Same with the tar.gz.

There is already a caveat for macOS in Atom where a command is provided that isn't accessible to other platforms to install the application and apm/ppm commands. (see conversation and atom docs).

When you first open Atom, it will try to install the atom and apm commands for use in the terminal. In some cases, Atom might not be able to install these commands because it needs an administrator password. ... To install the atom and apm commands, run "Window: Install Shell Commands" from the Command Palette, which will prompt you for an administrator password.

There also seems to be a current issue with the Windows binary not installing this to the path which was seemingly handled by Squirrel. Discord.

Now this does work in many places. The .deb file certainly adds pulsar to the path and I suspect the .rpm and macOS .dmg are similar as the pulsar.sh file seems to be the one responsible for this.

How to fix it?

I think it is important that this gets resolved as currently in the docs it assumes that pulsar -p will always work and it seems a bit silly to offer formats where this integration isn't possible without manual steps. It might be useful simply to expose this command to all platforms and extend the logic to work for all of them. This would allow manual install of the command no matter what system it is run on (and in cases where it doesn't work it will be easier to expand this so that it does). This would also potentially solve the Windows problem and take the guesswork out of the existing macOS case.

There should be a mechanism for this to run automatically on first start as well (maybe check from the config.cson) but it maybe shouldn't run without prompting for those who want to use it entirely as a portable app without leaving any traces. Maybe a first start popup asking to integrate Pulsar on the path with a brief explanation.

Enter your response below:

Seamless integration of the pulsar and ppm commands without needing to manually add Pulsar to the path.

Any alternatives?

Updated installer? A new appimage command for the appimage such as ./Pulsar_1.63.0.appimage --install that would be the .desktop exec or an option? Use docs to cover this use case?

None really seem ideal with our supported distributions.

Other examples:

I think Zed has this option as it doesn't put itself on the path on first install. Many other applications simply don't come as an appimage and just as OS specific packages which work natively.