guinget

Unofficial GUI for Microsoft's Windows Package Manager (winget). Kinda like Synaptic, but for Windows.

Not associated with Microsoft, and Microsoft does not endorse guinget. Not associated with the Synaptic project, either.

NB: I'm migrating to Codeberg. The canonical repo for guinget is now here, please update your remotes: https://codeberg.org/DrewNaylor/guinget

NB: If you installed winget in a regular user account, you may need to re-install it in an account with Admin permissions before installing guinget or any other packages that use Inno Setup installers. Be sure to update winget's sources before logging off the Admin account and back into your regular account, or winget's sources cache may claim it's corrupted when trying to use it in an Admin command prompt in your regular account.
This may no longer be necessary, at least on the latest update for Windows 10 2004. The purpose for this text was to say that winget doesn't properly elevate Inno Setup installers so you'd have to install them from an elevated CMD, but it seems to do just fine now. In fact, winget doesn't like to run elevated on 2004 from a limited account anymore, but at least it usually elevates installers. Whether this affects other versions of Windows 10 or if it's a bug are uncertain, but 1909 doesn't seem to have this issue.
Update 1-18-2021: It appears this bug affects applications installed via APPX/MSIX packages in general rather than just winget. This is confirmed by trying to run Windows Terminal from an elevated CMD prompt inside a "limited" account. The thing about it working with Inno Setup installers just fine may also be incorrect based on newer testing.
Update 3-10-2021: Versions of Windows 10 other than 2004 appear to be affected sometimes. Not sure what causes it.

Project Info

Main branch build status/nightly build:

Visual Studio 2019 Community is being used for this project's development, and .NET Framework 4.8 or newer for version 0.1.2 and newer (0.1.1 and older require at least .NET Framework 4.6.1) is required to run it.

Other libraries used (besides .NET):

• YAML files are being read with YamlDotNet, which uses the MIT license.
• To load the SQLite database, we're using Microsoft.Data.Sqlite, available under the MIT License.
• Scrolling tab control tabs with the mouse wheel is provided by libscrollswitchtabs, also available under the Apache License 2.0.

Licenses for all components included with the distribution are in the files starting with LICENSE.

There's a project roadmap available, if you're interested.

Installation and Usage

You can install guinget by running winget install guinget in an elevated CMD/PowerShell window (just use a regular CMD window if elevating it doesn't work), or by using an installer attached to the latest release. Please note that it may take a few days for new versions to be published to winget, so the Releases page is the fastest way to get new versions.

There's a video showing how to install and use guinget if you wish to watch it, though it only covers up to version 0.1.0.1 alpha.

Since it may be a bit complicated for new users, there's a guide on how to use guinget. I tried to make it work as closely as I could to Synaptic, so if you have experience with Synaptic, guinget should work similarly (mainly with marking packages) with a few exceptions in places I'm less experienced and/or wouldn't work as well on Windows.

Requirements

The system requirements include .NET Framework 4.8 for version 0.1.2 and newer (previous versions require at least .NET Framework 4.6.1) as mentioned above and winget, but otherwise they don't require all that much power.

Faster computers will perform better with few (if any) lock-ups when it comes to extracting and loading the package list, though. One goal is to eventually eliminate or reduce that lock-up as much as possible, which will require async loading. Not sure how to reliably do it with a datagridview yet, though.

Screenshots

These screenshots are outdated. It would be a good idea to provide new screenshots, so I might at some point.

Version 0.1.1 screenshot

This is what it looks like as of version 0.1.1:

Packages displayed here are loaded from a package list cache stored in %LocalAppData%\winget-frontends\source\winget-pkgs\pkglist\manifests, which is downloaded from Microsoft/winget-pkgs on GitHub. The Refresh cache button on the toolbar is the primary way to update these manifests.

Loading these YAML files takes a bit at the moment, as it's not async. I'd like to make it async, but for now this is good enough. Besides, there's a progress bar and progress label at the bottom and a label that says "please wait", so it's not like the window shows nothing while it loads. One issue is the window can't be moved around while it loads, which is something async loading would fix.

Newer versions of guinget mainly load package info from the same community database winget itself uses to ensure package info is up to date with what's available to winget. Descriptions and details not available in the database are then loaded from the manifests.

Loading the package list

Here's what it looks like when loading the package list:

The data grid view that's used for the package list is hidden while loading so that things go faster. If the data grid view were still visible, it would show all the rows as they're added and slow things down until rows that aren't on screen are being added, at which point it would speed up a lot.

Currently, the Status column cells just have arbitrary data for now; guinget doesn't check to see if an app is installed or not yet. Package details in the textbox at the bottom are loaded directly from the YAML files.

Showing hidden controls

By default, controls that don't have features implemented yet are hidden, but you can show them if you want to and this is what it looks like when you do so:

More screenshots

More screenshots available in the devlog archive. This document has a few things similar to the readme, but organized more by date and what I tried to do/did do around each time.

TODO

• [ ] Create graphical sources manager app, one that's kinda like Mintsources. May need a drop-down to select the primary source, since winget only uses one right now, but a list of sources would be a good idea to have at the same time.
• [X] Create library that can be used by guinget (as well as other winget front-ends that want to use it, even if that's not really a supported use case) that makes it easier to get package info from winget.
• [ ] Everything that would make guinget a functional front-end.
• [X] May need to fill in a bit for where winget lacks, such as an easily-accessible repo cache that's not in Program Files or wherever it's stored. As far as I know, it doesn't have a repo cache has a repo cache in its own folder that's not too easy to get to without showing system files, so I'll have to do that manually (for stuff like package searching and listing available packages) and it can be something that other front-ends can share, too. Would be a good idea to do what apt does with a lock file, though.
• [ ] Unless winget has this already, downloading a package installer without installing it would be a good addition. Maybe it could download to a configurable location or the user's Downloads folder, depending on what they want. Checking the SHA256 sum in guinget would be important for this feature.
• [X] Package search should be done by filtering the datagridview control's entries. This would have an option to filter when typing or only on Enter/on clicking Search. Entry filtering can also allow for showing just apps to be installed, to be removed, of specific categories (whenever that's officially supported by winget), etc.
• [ ] Support for filtering categories needs to be added if it's possible. May need to use tags instead.
• [X] Basic package search using contents of the Package column is available in version 0.1 pre-alpha 2.
• [X] Might be possible to directly read from the same database file as winget reads from; that is, https://winget.azureedge.net/cache/source.msix (update May 12, 2022: this is now located at https://cdn.winget.microsoft.com/cache/source.msix). This would require using SQLite to read the database inside "Public\index.db" in the MSIX package, but it should be possible I hope. Had some issues so far with EntityFramework not wanting to install when installing System.Data.Sqlite from Nuget. May require increasing .Net version. We're using YAML files for now. As of v0.2 alpha, database reading paired with manifests is the default and will be enforced in a version after v0.2.0.2.
• [X] Although it's probably unsupported by winget, maybe an alternate-functionality mode could directly use YAML files in the official repo to reduce how much would need to be downloaded. This could probably be a "Virtual Source", as it's not a database file and is only being used by guinget for search and listing. Unless this is supported by Microsoft in winget, it may not necessarily match what winget displays. (This is what we're doing for now.) This is combined with the database reading for details not available in the database and is also used if database reading is off.
• [X] To make it easier for other frontends to use and update the package list, maybe have it be saved to a folder like "winget-frontends-pkglist", and in that folder there will be folders with the name of each configured source, containing the package list files in there. (Just need to start using a file that can store sources and their locations so that ones other than the default Microsoft/winget-pkgs one can be used.)
• [ ] Ensuring this folder doesn't get messed up by a frontend while another one is running, have a file named "frontend.lock" in the root of "winget-frontends-pkglist" that both prevents other frontends from running when that file exists as well as storing the frontend's name for easy identification in other frontends that are being prevented from running, if they want to display the name of the app that's preventing them from running.
• [X] "winget-frontends-pkglist" could be stored in the user's LocalAppData folder. Having the location be configurable to be on a USB drive instead for example may make things confusing and result in frontends becoming incompatible or having the incorrect information if they choose to use a different location.
• [ ] Remember that winget allows installing from a manifest passed to it. This may be useful to allow for the user to select a manifest to install from the File menu, for example. Might also be possible to use this feature to have winget use the YAML manifests downloaded from Microsoft's winget-pkgs repo instead of the default one in winget, as well. This could help a lot when winget doesn't want to update its sources correctly due to bugs.