Use %-type filepath shortcuts when creating PATH aliases to reduce the PATH character count.

[DandelionSprout]

Relevant area(s)

WinGet CLI

Description of the new feature / enhancement

For whatever unholy reason, Windows OSs have a strictly enforced max length of 2,047 characters for the PATH environment value. And after installing relatively many portable packages from Winget-pkgs through Winget-cli, this can become something of a problem, as Winget-cli is seemingly (Pressure on "seemingly") able to silently fail to add new filepaths to PATH if the PATH character count has exceeded Windows' 2,047 character limit.

Accordingly, I think that it's time to apply File Explorer's %-type shorthands to the PATH values that Winget-cli generate when having installed a portable program.

Proposed technical implementation details

Make it so that situations where Winget-cli would currently create PATH entries with C:\Program Files (x86)\(...) and C:\Program Files\(...), would instead create ones with %ProgramFiles(x86)%\(...) and %ProgramFiles%\(...) respectively.

This would reduce the increased length of PATH by 3 and 2 characters respectively for each installation.

[denelon]

Just for information:

The path is typically added to when an application is installed by an unelevated user (with Developer Mode disabled). Some portable applications have DLL dependencies, and in those cases the path is used as well.

Otherwise, when the user installs a portable package elevated, or with Developer Mode enabled, a symbolic link is used instead.