Let’s be honest. Windows out of the box is like a freshly unboxed smartphone: shiny, promising, and completely useless until you’ve downloaded the essentials. You need your tools; and unless you’re into spelunking through random .exe files from “TotallyLegitSoftware.exe”, you ought to consider a package manager to handle all this.

My choice? Scoop. While Chocolatey flexes its enterprise muscles and winget rides the Microsoft coattails, Scoop quietly does what it does best: keeps your system clean, organized, and scoopable as I like to say.

Why Scoop?

Most Windows installers scatter files like confetti at a chaotic parade. Registry keys? Check. Leftover DLLs in Program Files? Double check. A mysterious C:\Users\You\AppData\Roaming\WhoPutThisHere folder? Triple check.

Scoop? Nah. It installs everything into a single directory, your own little storage box. Install? Done. Uninstall? Poof. Gone. No ghosts. No traces. Just clean.

A great consequence of this behavior, is if your corporate overlords deem that you must run some overly sensitive anti-something. Then you can also try persuade them to exclude the Scoop install location, ensuring everything runs smoooth again.

Get started in PowerShell in 2 Lines

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://get.scoop.sh | Invoke-Expression

Note: Check scoop.sh for the latest command

Let’s add some Buckets

Scoop uses the concept of “buckets”. Essentially, they are app repositories. I like to start with the following essentials.

scoop bucket add extras
scoop bucket add nonportable
scoop bucket add versions
  • extras: Apps that don’t meet the main bucket criteria
  • nonportable: These apps typically require admin rights to install properly
  • versions: When you need nodejs16 and not the latest nodejs, because someone wrote a legacy script in TypeScript from 2018.

A Bucket it something you can even manage yourself if you want to have ultimate control. An example of this is Scoop-Spotify which has BlockTheSpot, and spicetify related content.

Finding Applications

It’s really quite easy. There’s a built in scoop search <something> command which can search the buckets you have added for a given application. For example:

scoop search bitwarden
Results from local buckets...

Name          Version   Source Binaries
----          -------   ------ --------
bitwarden-cli 2025.10.0 main
bitwarden     2025.10.0 extras

Though my preference it to use https://scoop.sh/ and search there. I’ve often found it is faster, provides links to source websites for documentation look up, and sometimes you find alternative applications that you’ve never heard of that are absolute gems.

Carl’s Opinionated Tool Time!

Now, let’s bootstrap a machine that doesn’t suck, according to me. I also come to realize that I’ve installed waaay more than I feel like needs sharing here. So I’ve selected some of the good ones.

Core Tools

scoop install sudo firefox-developer vscode-insiders notepadplusplus fork meld 7zip greenshot vlc powertoys logseq flow-launcher imhex fsviewer bruno
  • firefox-developer: I don’t like supporting Google’s bullying of web standards. Firefox works great - no extension issues here. Sensible defaults for development.
  • vscode-insiders: Visual Studio Code, but Insiders version. I go with Insiders because it still always seems to work fine, and I get the latest improvements.
  • sudo: Run commands as an administrator on Windows
  • fork: A (paid) Git client that doesn’t make you want to scream. Otherwise gitextensions has served me well before.
  • meld: A simple Diff tool that won’t make you question your life choices. Beyond Compare is a popular alternative, but I’ve never needed more than meld.
  • greenshot: Why Microsoft doesn’t just embed this into Windows by default is beyond me
  • powertoys: Microsoft’s “we should’ve built this into Windows” toolkit.
  • flow-launcher: Alt+Space and boom. Loads of plugins, but I just use it to replace Start Menu’s shit search.
  • imhex: Insanely powerful tool for analyzing data structures. I only scratch the surface with this one! Sorry HxD but I don’t open you so much anymore.
  • fsviewer: FastStone, an image viewer that supports many RAW formats as well as other image related functionality.
  • bruno: Similar to Postman, just doesn’t suck.

Kubernetes Tools: Because You’re Not Afraid of YAML

scoop install kubectl freelens helm
  • kubectl: The CLI… That I like to avoid using.
  • freelens: A fork of Lens, that’s free. Avoids needing to know every `kubectl` command
  • helm: Because manually writing YAML is fun… said no one ever.

Infrastructure as Code: terraform All the Things

scoop install terraform

One command. Infinite cloud resources. Zero accountability. Though really, you may want to install OpenTofu instead (read about the drama).

Front End Tools

scoop install nodejs yarn pnpm

Yes, you could use nvm.

Database Tools: Query Like a Boss

scoop install dbeaver sql-server-management-studio-np
  • dbeaver: Open-source, multi-database, and doesn’t crash when you open three tabs.
  • sql-server-management-studio-np: The non-portable version, because SQL Server needs to touch the registry. We accept the tragedy.

Support Role Tools: When you need to Bard

scoop install mremoteng fiddler wiztree grepwin glogg nimbletext filezilla wireshark
  • mremoteng: Manage 47 remote servers like a sysadmin ninja.
  • fiddler / wireshark: Packet sniffing for the curious (and the suspicious).
  • wiztree: Find which temp file needs a “go to jail” moment. WinDirStat is an alternative.
  • grepwin: grep, but for Windows, with GUI flair.
  • glogg: Sure, send me that 10GB single .txt file - glogg will open it.
  • nimbletext: Text manipulation magic
  • filezilla: FTP client that’s been around since the dial up era.

Graphical Tools

scoop install inkscape gimp obs-studio
  • inkscape: Vector graphics without Adobe’s pricing model.
  • gimp: Raster graphics without Adobe’s pricing model.
  • obs-studio: Streaming/recording tool that’s free.

Supporting Apps: The Background Noise of Productivity

scoop bucket add spotify https://github.com/TheRandomLabs/Scoop-Spotify.git
scoop install telegram spotify-latest vlc
  • spotify-latest: Work only happens at 150BPM. The Scoop-Spotify has other nice goodies.
  • telegram: Why do people still use WhatsApp?
  • vlc: The Swiss Army knife of media players. Also Very Large Cone.

Managing Scoop

As great as I think scoop is. It’s still a bit of a messy teenager that skips some chores. These can be bloating of the cache directory, maintaining installs of past versions, and such.

So a few things you can run to keep things lean and clean are:

  • scoop cache rm *: Removes cached downloads
  • scoop cleanup *: Removes previous versions

You can also run these commands by replace the * with an application name for instance, for a more targeted cleanup.

Final Scoop: Less Chaos, More Control

With Scoop, you’re not just installing apps you’re curating an environment. One that’s reproducible, portable, and yours. It can also be convenient to maintain a Gist of your buckets and apps so you can bootstrap a device super easily.

Keeping apps up to date is easy, a simple scoop update and that’s all.