winget now supports portable apps

Windows Package Manager "winget" starts supporting portable apps. The appropriate capability is available since  1.3.1251-preview. Currently it is an experimental feature, but it is enabled by default in the preview release.

Portable apps are the software that doesn't require to be installed. In most cases, the user simply need to download a ZIP archive with the app, extract the contents to any folder, and run. Most of winaero apps are portable apps.

True portable apps don't use the Registry and don't store their files in users' folders. They keep all their settings in their own directory.

Finally, some of the apps aren't portable by default, but support a dedicated portable mode. The popular Notepad++ editor can be installed as a regular app, but also supports portable installation. The same for the Vivaldi browser - you can install it as a portable app which stores everything in one folder.

Portable app support in Winget

As of now, the support for portable apps is pretty limited, having the room for improvements. In particular, it doesn't support upgrading and uninstalling such apps.

Finally, as the feature is still experimental, the community repository does not accept portable applications. Contributors can only test local manifests, and have to manually clean up entries in Windows Apps & Features to remove all traces for a portable application.

Among other changes in today's preview release, winget has got an updated dataset for the --info argument, which now includes the system architecture.

Additionally, you can add a new setting to the config file that permanently enables verbose logs, without specifying the --verbose-logs argument.

Finally, the progress bars winget shows now use more fine-grained blocks, in steps of 1/8 of the width of a block.

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