LHInstaller

Put the programs of a freshly formatted PC back in place, in two steps.

A portable Windows app: you build a list of programs before you format, copy a single .exe to a USB stick, and afterwards one button downloads and installs everything again.

It stores no installers of its own — everything is fetched when the time comes, from the official sources, through winget, the Windows package manager.

Italiano: README.it.md · LEGGIMI.txt

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Why it exists

Reinstalling a PC means remembering what you had, hunting down a dozen download pages, and clicking Next thirty times. Windows already ships with a package manager that can do all of that unattended; it just has no memory of your list. This is that memory, plus a button.

What the target PC needs

Nothing. A clean Windows 10 or 11 already has everything:

.NET Framework 4.8	yes — it is an OS component
winget	yes — ships as "App Installer"
Python, Node, any runtime	not needed

If winget is missing, LHInstaller says so at startup and disables the button rather than pretending to work.

How you use it

Before formatting

1. Read from this PC — two tabs. The first lists what you have that winget can reinstall by itself: tick and done. The second lists what winget cannot put back (installed from a website, licensed, from a vendor portal). For those you can look for a catalog match, paste the installer address, open a web search, or file them as reminders.
2. Search the catalog — type a name; the row marked Recommended is the latest stable version, with beta/nightly variants pushed down.
3. Add address — for anything the catalog does not carry.
4. Organise into groups, tick what you want, and copy the folder to a USB stick. Two files are enough: LHInstaller.exe and the LHInstaller.json it writes next to itself.

After formatting

Copy the folder back, double-click, press Start installs. One administrator prompt for the whole session, then it downloads and installs in sequence. The embedded console streams winget's real output, line by line; the Status column shows where each program is.

Features

• winget catalog search with the main package ranked first, not the beta
• Reads the current PC and splits it into reinstallable and not reinstallable
• Direct addresses for anything outside the catalog, with the installer family detected from the file's own signature (Inno Setup, NSIS, MSI, WiX, InstallShield)
• Reminders for programs you must fetch by hand, so nothing is silently lost
• Groups with tri-state checkboxes, instant filter, per-entry install
• Update check for both the listed packages and LHInstaller itself
• Full backup / restore, and import/export in winget export format
• Italian and English, switchable from the toolbar
• Portable: a single ~230 KB executable, no installation, no dependencies

What it does not cover

The winget catalog covers what you download from the web: browsers, Discord, Spotify, VLC, 7-Zip, Steam, Blender, Git, Python, VS Code, OBS and so on.

It does not cover software tied to a personal licence or an account — audio plug-ins, DAWs, video suites and the like. Those appear in the Not reinstallable tab, where you decide for each one: installer address, reminder, or the vendor's portal as usual.

For direct addresses a silent install is not guaranteed: each installer family takes a different argument. LHInstaller recognises the common ones from the downloaded file's signature; when it cannot tell, it opens the installer window and says so in the console instead of pretending it worked.

Building it

.\build.ps1

That is the whole toolchain. It uses csc.exe from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET, present on every Windows 10 and 11 — no Visual Studio, no .NET SDK. The pleasant consequence: the very PC LHInstaller exists to repopulate can also rebuild it from source.

The price is that the in-box compiler stops at C# 5, and reads files with the system codepage — so the sources stay pure ASCII, with non-ASCII characters written as "\uXXXX". build.ps1 refuses to compile if it finds a stray byte, because the alternative is a binary that is subtly wrong and says nothing.

Design notes

A few decisions that are not obvious from the code:

Reading winget's tables without depending on the language. winget prints fixed-width tables and translates the headers into the Windows display language. Table.cs derives column positions from the header row and reads values by position, never by name. Every word of the header starts a column: when a column is as narrow as its own title (Name Id Version) only a single space separates it from the next, so counting two spaces — as an earlier version did — made the Id column disappear on small tables.

Recognising a downloaded installer. Trying silent flags one after another would mean running the same installer several times. Instead the first and last 2 MB of the file are scanned for the family signature, skipping null bytes so UTF-16 strings read as text too.

Matching installed programs to the catalog, conservatively. A first rule ("the name starts with…") was wrong once in every two matches on a real machine — DaVinci Resolve matched a third-party DaVinci Resolve RPC plug-in. The rule now requires an exact normalised-name match and separates sure matches (the publisher in the identifier appears in the name) from maybe ones, shown in orange for a human to judge. Fewer results, no wrong ones.

Two languages without a key table. Italian and English sit next to each other at the point of use — Tr.T("Salva", "Save") — rather than in a separate dictionary. It costs a few characters per line and removes the classic failure of these setups: a key changed on one side and stale on the other. What ends up in the profile is never translated: group names are stored in Italian and translated only when displayed, so a profile built in English still opens in Italian.

Versions compared numerically. 1.10 is newer than 1.9; non-numeric segments that differ (g366879e1) trigger nothing at all, because guessing there would be worse than staying quiet.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.