The purpose of an add-on is to help everyone create a backup of installed add-ons.
NVDA has a wide variety of add-ons, that can be installed from the NVDA Community Add-ons website
At the same time, there are a number of unofficial add-ons created by users around the world, the sources of which can be difficult to find after reinstalling the operating system or NVDA itself.
The add-on creates a backup copy of the selected add-ons, packs it into a standard ".nvda-addon" file, which can be installed later on another PC, another copy of NVDA, or can be shared.
Also, during the generation process, the add-on automatically deletes the "pycache" folder.
The generated ".nvda-addon" file also has the version number taken from the "manifest.ini" file, just like the original addons downloaded from the official community website.
The add-on is not my original work, nor does any code apply to me, add-on created by hxebolax. The reason I created my own copy of this add-on is because I made changes that hxebolax didn't accept because he created the add-on packaging differently. More precisely, an optional tag was added to the final filename at the end, which will be detailed later, so I decided to create my own copy for this add-on, but many thanks to hxebolax for creating this useful add-on.
The add-on is easy to use. When you open the add-on window, which can be found in the NVDA Tools menu, you will have a list that contains all add-ons, whether they are enabled or disabled and buttons for performing actions with the add-on.
Press the up and down arrows to move through the list of add-ons. To select one add-on, press Space or, if you need to select all add-ons at once, press Alt + S.
The buttons can be moved using the Tab key, they are as follows:
As mentioned above, when you select a folder for the first time, the read-only text box will be the destination of the folder you selected. The reason this field is read-only is to avoid accidentally entering text in the folder edit field, which could affect the destination path of the folder.
The destination folder will be saved for the next use of the add-on, even if NVDA is restarted to quickly generate the selected add-on without reselecting the folder.
If the destination folder is deleted from the hard drive, the folder must be selected again by clicking the "Browse" button.
There are no predefined gestures in the add-on, and you can assign them by going to the NVDA menu, Preferences, Input Gestures and looking for the "Add-on packer" category. There is currently only one function that can be assigned to a gesture: "Shows the add-on packer window", which will open the add-on packer window.
The add-on will inform us at any time if there are any errors in use. It will warn if we generate an add-on without selecting it, or by selecting an add-on and leaving the folder field blank. The add-on will inform us about the successful generation of add-ons, as well as any errors that occurred during the generation.
There is a progress bar when generating add-ons, which can be useful for getting information about the percentage of the generation process.
This is a major change, for which I created my own version of the add-on, as the changes below were not accepted by the author of the add-on.
In the original add-on, the generated ".nvda-addon" file had an optional "gen" tag at the end of the file name (eg: addonPacker-1.0_gen.nvda-addon), which indicated that the add-on was not original and was generated.
I removed this tag, because it is unnecessary, since the generated files are the original standard ".nvda-addon" files, so I see no point in indicating that this add-on was generated by adding a tag at the end of the filename.
The author's reason, I suppose, was that I am not taking any responsibility for the add-ons that will be generated by my created add-on and I just wash my hands if something happens to the PC with the generated add-on, so he added a "gen" tag to indicate that the add-on is not original, but that is a really meaningless reason, but this is absolutely the author's decision, so I'm not forcing anyone to do what they don't want to do.
It should be noted that the final generated file is a standard NVDA add-on file, so it is strictly forbidden to put sensitive information in the add-on folder that will be generated, because this add-on adds or removes nothing, it just generates the installed add-ons.
This is never the case with official add-ons, but as mentioned, there are hundreds of unofficial add-ons out there, so we advise you not to put sensitive information in the add-on folder.
I and, of course, the author of the add-on (hxebolax) are exempt from any responsibility.