Commands

Every NSIS command, grouped by what you are trying to do, each with a description, a signature and something you can paste. For a count of which commands are supported, run installua coverage.

Reading an entry. The heading is the NSIS or MUI2 name, because that is what you already know and what search engines have indexed. Everything under it is Installua. Square brackets are optional positions, … a repeated one, { … } the trailing options table. → names what comes back; → nothing means the call is a statement.

Coverage. Every one of the 276 commands makensis -CMDHELP prints is accounted for: either in a group below, or in Not available. The 255 MUI2 names are in the MUI2 reference. Nothing is pending — the todo bucket of both censuses is empty.

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The groups

Group	Covers
Program structure	the blocks a file is made of, and the declarations inside them
Script attributes	the attributes {} block: name, output, compression, manifest, version info
Sections and install types	what the components page offers and what each part costs
Pages and MUI	page.welcome, page.license, … and everything drawn on them — its own file
Windows and controls	page.custom: controls, colours, fonts, events
Languages and locales	languages { locales = { … } } and the language dialog
Files and directories	packing files in, and what happens to them on the target disk
Files on the target at runtime	fileOpen and the handle methods
Registry and INI	reading and writing HKLM, HKCU, and .ini files
Processes and the shell	exec, shortcuts, DLLs, reboot
Strings and numbers	string.*, arithmetic, comparison
Flow, errors and messages	aborting, testing, telling the user
Windows facts	what the machine is: version, shell folders, registry view
Plugins and headers	plugin, import, raw, declaring a third-party one
Constants	INSTDIR, PROGRAMFILES64, HKLM, …
Not available	what has no Installua equivalent, and what to write instead

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Generating this file

This document is hand-written, which is exactly what a correspondence document must not stay. Most of it is already in the tables:

Part of an entry	Where it comes from today
Heading (NSIS name)	Row::nsis
Signature	a call renderer over Instruction, the shape src/table/doc.rs used to print before it was retired with LANGUAGE.md
Return type	Instruction::outputs() and the Ty of each
Options list	Row::options, the Offer names
Example	Row::example — already written, already compiled
Attribute usage line	Class::Attribute(Setting)
“Written by the compiler”	Class::Lowering(spelling)
“Rejected” reason	Class::Rejected(why)
MUI spelling	mui::rows::Row’s second field
Group	new: Row::group
Description	new: Row::blurb, one or two sentences

So the generator is src/table/reference.rs, a cargo run -q -- generate reference > docs/reference-map.md arm beside generate table, and two new fields the census can require exactly the way it requires a class today — a command with no group is a census failure, which is what stops a new NSIS version quietly adding an undocumented command.

Open questions for the group axis:

1. One group per command, or several? CreateShortcut is both “files and directories” and “processes and the shell”. One group keeps the document a partition and the census a count; several needs an index instead.
2. Where do the non-command surfaces go? page.*, import, glob, the control types and string.* have no -CMDHELP line and so no row, but a user reference without them has holes exactly where beginners look. This draft writes them by hand; a generator needs rows of their own.
3. The MUI half is a second table. src/mui/rows.rs carries one spelling per name and no group, so the same two fields have to land there too.