🚀 wid – Fast, lightweight and free package installer for Windows

wid is a package installer for Windows, written in Rust.
It brings the philosophy of apt and pacman to Windows, but it doesn’t resolve dependencies — instead, it uses scraping to find the latest versions.

✨ Features

  • 🦀 Written in Rust – memory-safe, zero-cost, ultra-fast.
  • ⚡ ~2 MB RAM – much lighter than winget, choco, or scoop.
  • 🌐 Direct TCP + rustls – achieves ~99% bandwidth (no BITS, no Schannel).
  • 🕵️ Scraping – extracts real .exe and .msi links from HTML pages (e.g., VSCode, Firefox).
  • 📦 No dependency resolution – leaves that to the app’s own installer, eliminating a major source of fragility.
  • 📝 You control the repository – sources.list is a simple text file you manage yourself.
  • 🔓 GPL v3 – fully free and open-source.

📥 Installation

Download wid_installer.exe from GitHub Releases and run it.

🛠️ Usage

wid update               # Update the package list
wid search <keyword>     # Search the repository
wid install <app>        # Download and install an app
wid upgrade <app>        # Check for updates and upgrade if available
wid clean                # Clean temporary files
  • ZeSystem@programming.devOP
    0·
    14 days ago

    Matt, you’re absolutely right — thanks for the heads-up! I’ve just removed wid_installer.exe from the repository. From now on, only source code will be in the repo, and all releases will be distributed exclusively via GitHub Releases. Appreciate the feedback!