So I was reinstalling my Windows machine and though it would be a pain to reinstall all those programs. And then I remembered I wanted to give Chocolatey a try a while back. Whats that you ask?

Apart from being awesome? It is a package manager for Windows. That sounds super boring but bare with me. Yeah and it has a command line interface… Oh, no. I lost you, reader, didn’t I?

It allows you to install all those favorite programs, but instead of downloading .exe installer, launching it, clicking Next, Next… you just type one line into the command line.

For example to install VLC player just type “choco install vlc” into the windows command line.

There are plenty of programs (=packages) in the list.

But wait. There is more. It allows you to update all those programs without the need to launch them individually and check for updates. For more tech savvy guys – you can run a script which automatically updates all your choco packages (=programs installed with chocolatey).

To update all your programs to latest versions type in “choco upgrade all“.

You like it already, dont you. Well, I am not done.

Say you have more then one computer or that you want to install essential programs on both your desktop and laptop. Or your parents or girlfriends machine too.

Chocolatey allows you to install programs from the config file. You can export this config file using ChocolateyGUI.

Export packages.config on one machine, copy it to another and run “choco install packages.config“. Voilà! You got your programs on that machine too.

Delicious isnt it?

One last thing, Chocolatey will prompt you for confirmations when running all these commands. When you want to skip these just add “-y” after the command. Like this “choco install vlc -y“.