Win7-Zip on NixOS

This document records how the Windows 7-Zip File Manager from iamcheyan/7z-for-Linux is packaged, integrated with the desktop, and adapted for Wine on this machine.

Design

The upstream project is a Linux launcher around the Windows 7-Zip GUI. Its published AppImage is about 331 MB. The AppImage's AppRun expects to download a Wine AppImage on first launch and writes desktop entries and associations to the user's home directory. Those runtime downloads and mutable desktop files do not fit this repository's declarative NixOS setup.

Instead, this configuration fetches a pinned source snapshot, installs the upstream Windows program files and resources, and runs 7zFM.exe with the system's wineWow64Packages.stable. Nix generates the launcher and desktop entry. The package does not run the upstream AppRun script and does not need FUSE or a mutable AppImage.

The package currently targets x86_64-linux. It includes the upstream exe/ tree, which contains 7zFM.exe, the 7-Zip DLLs, language resources, and related files. The release/source version recorded by the package is 7-Zip 24.08.

Files and responsibilities

packages/wind7z.nix pins the upstream Git revision and hash, installs its Windows files, generates the Wine wrapper and desktop entry, and imports the per-prefix registry configuration on launch.
modules/home-manager/nixos-user.nix installs the package for the x86_64 Home Manager user.
modules/workstation.nix selects wind7z.desktop as the default handler for common archive MIME types.
modules/fonts.nix installs WenQuanYi Micro Hei as a system font. Wine's fontconfig integration can then find it from the prefix.

The package launcher is named wind7z; the registered desktop application ID is wind7z.desktop.

Launch and Wine prefix

The desktop entry launches the wrapper with the selected archive path. The wrapper:

Uses $HOME/.local/share/wineprefixes/wind7z as its default WINEPREFIX, while honoring an explicitly supplied WINEPREFIX.
Imports cjk-fonts.reg into that prefix before starting the GUI.
Starts the pinned exe/7zFM.exe using NixOS's Wine package.

The prefix stores Wine's generated registry and user state outside the Nix store. The executable, language files, registry template, and desktop entry remain immutable in /nix/store.

The wrapper can also be launched from a terminal:

wind7z /path/to/archive.rar

Archive associations

The Home Manager MIME defaults point these types to wind7z.desktop:

7z, ZIP, and RAR
XZ, BZip/BZip2, and gzip
tar and compressed tar

The default is declared in modules/workstation.nix; it is not written by the upstream AppImage on first run. To inspect an association:

xdg-mime query default application/zip
xdg-mime query default application/x-7z-compressed

Both should return wind7z.desktop after Home Manager activation. RAR is supported for opening and extraction; 7-Zip does not create RAR archives.

Chinese language and fonts

The system already had Noto CJK fonts, but the first Wine prefix had Japanese font/codepage defaults and the 7-Zip interface opened in Japanese. The package now sets the 7-Zip language value to zh-cn and maps common Windows CJK font names, including MS Shell Dlg, MS UI Gothic, SimSun, and Microsoft YaHei, to WenQuanYi Micro Hei. The mapping is added both through Windows font substitutions and Wine's font replacement registry so legacy controls can use the installed Linux font.

WenQuanYi Micro Hei was added because it is a TrueType CJK screen font with hinting that suits the small text sizes used by this older Win32 interface. Noto CJK remains installed for the rest of the desktop.

Font smoothing and size

Wine stores separate system font records for menus and dialog/message controls. The options dialog and the main File Manager menu therefore need not look the same even inside one process. In particular, changing the CJK fallback alone does not change the menu's selected font, point size, or rendering quality.

The generated registry file applies these prefix-local settings:

120 DPI (LogPixels 120) for a modest increase over Wine's 96 DPI default.
Wine/Windows font smoothing enabled with grayscale smoothing, gamma 0x578, and RGB orientation.
WindowMetrics\MenuFont set to WenQuanYi Micro Hei at a larger height with GDI antialias quality. The dialog's message font is left as a separate setting.

MenuFont is stored as a Windows LOGFONTW binary registry value. Its current font height is -14, weight is 400, quality is 4 (antialiased), and face name is WenQuanYi Micro Hei. Keeping this binary in the package template makes the setting reproducible whenever the launcher starts.

These changes target the missing glyphs and the visibly small/rough menu text without changing the dialog font configuration. They do not guarantee that the main menu and dialog will look identical: Wine and 7-Zip can render individual controls differently. Recheck the result after changing Wine, the font package, or the display scale. The relevant Wine settings are read during process startup, so close and reopen 7-Zip after changing them.

Inspecting the current setup

# Confirm the CJK font resolves through fontconfig
fc-match 'WenQuanYi Micro Hei'

# Confirm the selected language and menu font in this prefix
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.local/share/wineprefixes/wind7z" \
  wine reg query 'HKCU\Software\7-Zip' /v Lang
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.local/share/wineprefixes/wind7z" \
  wine reg query 'HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics' /v MenuFont

# Confirm the launcher and MIME default
command -v wind7z
xdg-mime query default application/zip

Expected language is zh-cn, and the MIME handler is wind7z.desktop.

Updating the upstream snapshot

The source revision and fixed-output hash in packages/wind7z.nix must be updated together. For a new source commit:

Set rev to the exact upstream commit and update version to the bundled 7-Zip version.
Recompute the unpacked source hash with nix-prefetch-url --unpack and set the returned hash in fetchFromGitHub.
Build the package and check that exe/7zFM.exe, the CJK language file, and any required DLLs are still present.
Open representative ZIP, 7z, and RAR archives and recheck the Chinese menu and dialog rendering after the Wine prefix has been updated.

Apply this machine's system configuration with:

nix flake check --no-build --impure
nixos-rebuild build --flake .#hx90 --impure
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#hx90 --impure