I (mostly) use Vim, and it’s available on Flathub. However: my plugins are managed with Vundle, which shells out to git to download and update them. But git is not in the org.freedesktop.Platform runtime that the Vim Flatpak uses, so that’s not going to work!
If you’ve read any of my recent posts about Flatpak, you’ll know my favourite hammer. I allowed Vim to use flatpak-spawn by launching it as:
flatpak run --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak org.vim.Vim
I saved the following file to /tmp/git:
#!/bin/sh exec flatpak-spawn --host git "$@"
then ran the following Vim commands to make it executable, add it to the path, then fire up Vundle:
:r !chmod +x /tmp/git :let $PATH = '/tmp:/app/bin:/usr/bin' :VundleInstall
This tricks Vundle into running git outside the sandbox. It worked!
I’m posting this partly as a note to self for next time I want to do this, and partly to say “can we do better?”. In this specific case, the Vim Flatpak could use org.freedesktop.Sdk as its runtime, like many other editors do. But this only solves the problem for tools like git which are included in the relevant SDK. What if I’m writing Python and want to use pyflakes, which is not in the SDK?