Please provide an AppImage for Linux

[probonopd]

Neovim itself is already available as an AppImage. Providing an oni AppImage would have, among others, these advantages:

• Applications packaged as an AppImage can run on many distributions (including Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS, elementaryOS, Linux Mint, and others)
• One app = one file = super simple for users: just download one AppImage file, make it executable, and run
• No unpacking or installation necessary
• No root needed
• No system libraries changed
• Works out of the box, no installation of runtimes needed
• Optional desktop integration with appimaged
• Optional binary delta updates, e.g., for continuous builds (only download the binary diff) using AppImageUpdate
• Can optionally GPG2-sign your AppImages (inside the file)
• Works on Live ISOs
• Can use the same AppImages when dual-booting multiple distributions
• Can be listed in the AppImageHub central directory of available AppImages
• Can double as a self-extracting compressed archive with the --appimage-extract parameter

Here is an overview of projects that are already distributing upstream-provided, official AppImages.

If you have questions, AppImage developers are on #AppImage on irc.freenode.net.

[oni-bot]

Hello and welcome to the Oni repository! Thanks for opening your first issue here. To help us out, please make sure to include as much detail as possible - including screenshots and logs, if possible.

[badosu]

@probonopd Are you able to do it?

[CrossR]

From a very quick look, it does seem like electron_builder has an option to build an AppImage, it will just be a case of ensuring we have the correct dependencies all bundled.

Technically, for Linux we assume Neovim is installed, so perhaps we'd need a second step to build the app image and grab nvim for it as well, since we don't want to include it in the other intalls.

There is some potentially useful information for us adding this over in one of @probonopd other threads: electron-userland/electron-builder#504

[probonopd]

Neovim has an official AppImage, too. You can either just include this in your own AppImage, or first extract it using --appimage-extract and include its payload in your own AppImage.