Thursday, September 3, 2015

PowerShell and Chocolatey Goodness

A movement has long been afoot to bring a useful package management system to Windows. If you’ve used apt or yum or yast or some similar tool in a Linux distribution, then you know how easy it can be to install new software to your computer with the right utility. Enter chocolatey, the PowerShell package manager for Windows.
Before starting a new class I make sure I load up my instructor computer with my favorite text editor and my chosen file manager:
choco install -y vim doublecmd
If I’m going to play videos for my class, I may also add a nice player:
choco install vlc
Of course, if I see that the machine I’m using has an older version of PowerShell I may want to update that:
choco install -y powershell4
What if I don’t know the name of the package I want? If I want to install the Angry IP network scan tool but know not what the package is called, I’ll ask chocolatey:
choco search angry
This is such a cool tool that rumor has it that even Microsoft is interested in using it. We’ll see. Perhaps managing software in Windows will soon be as easy as it is in Linux.
Bee seeing you.

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