A long time ago, I realized that despite being somewhat crummy in terms of typical shell features, the Windows command prompt could do everything I usually needed a Unix shell to do. The only issue was the lack of programs and dealing with the horrible way most user guides instruct you to deal with setting environment variables. I decided to use a batch file to set all the environment variables I needed and documented how to do this here. It was a huge improvement over how I'd done things until then, where I'd simply hoped the installers had set (or not set) whichever environment variables I needed and kept a collection of lesser batch files to explicitly change variables when appropriate.

But the experience was still not optimal, and I felt this whenver I switched machines. The problem was all of the tools. So, I decided to create a “tools” directory with actual programs, such as Sublime Text, which I'd want to use on any Windows machine I moved to. This turned out to be a disaster; maintaining all those binary files led to wasted space and confusion. Eventually I settled on storing only a few select things in there, such as the all-important batch file I mention above, as well as a few important things such as my Key Pass install. For everything else I used the native installers which ended up being easier but left me with my original problem.

As any Linux user knows, this state of affairs is less than ideal. It's also fairly specific to Windows. In Linux, there are normally these amazing programs called “package managers” which let you download and install things by entering a single line of text at the command line. OSX has two of them as well- Homebrew and Macports. Windows actually has had package managers too, but the problem is there have been about a half dozen of them which I've seen and none of them contain that many packages. The most important part of a package manager is that it needs to be ubiqitious and have access to everything.

Enter Chocolatey

Yesterday I stumbled across “Chocolatey”, yet another package manager for Windows. I'm ready to say that this is the one all Windows people should be using. It is the first package manager that is good enough to make not using it seem like a mistake.

Why, in my opinion, is Chocolatey better than everything else?

First, it piggy backs off of multiple pre-existing technologies, including traditional Windows exe installers and MSIs. This means many Chocolatey packages are just simple bits of code which silently install pre-existing installers. This means if authors don't want to waste time writing Chocolatey packages in addition to their traditional installers, they don't have to- they (or someone else) just writes a tiny Chocolatey package file that defers to the installer. Adding packages like this is so easy to do it took me just a few hours to write my first one last night.

Second, it piggy backs off NuGet. This is a package manager for .NET language development that has become increasingly popular over the years for distributing libraries with or without code. NuGet recently added support for C and C++ code as well and will probably be the defacto code library manager for Windows in the future (baring any stupid ass decisions by Microsoft to fragment their own ecosystem, which they are fond of doing). What's great about backing Chocolatey with a development focused packaging tool is it makes it more approachable for exisitng developers and also allows for user-facing applications to be created from source, typical to how many Linux packages are distributed.

Third, while many Chocolatey packages do seem to put extra crap on the %PATH% environment variable (mostly because they're based off Windows installers which do the same thing), Chocolatey itself adds a single directory to the path which packages are then invited to install additional batch file redirects to. This helps to keep the %PATH% clean while allowing users to run “cinst” (the chocolatey install program) and have new programs available on their path.

Fourth, Chocolatey has great aesthetics. The name “Chocolatey” comes from a silly joke about how “everyone loves Chocolatey NuGet” which I support as a lover of inane project names that will be passive-aggressively disrespected in a “professional” envrionment (this joke is helped tremendously by the fact that the NuGet logo, when colored brown, looks like a delicious confection). I also love how Chocolatey's output looks- it isn't afraid to use colors- and how pretty it's official website is.

Fifth, installing Chocolatey is very simple- just copy and paste a single line into a command prompt! It's only serious dependency is PowerShell which makes it incompatable with Windows XP, but at this point *no one* should be running XP.

Finally, Chocolatey has already bested its competition by having a ton of packages- 1636 at this moment- and the count is continously growing.

Chocolatey is the future of Windows scripting and development. There is literally [no reason you should not visit it's site and begin using it today.