How to reinstall all your apps with winget (and what it misses)

Setting up a new Windows machine used to cost me an evening. Open a browser, hunt for the same twenty apps one at a time, click through every installer, and still miss half of them until the moment I needed one. winget fixes most of that, and it's the install engine I built Endstate on top of. But winget on its own leaves gaps, and they're the kind you only notice later.

Here is how to reinstall your apps with winget, and exactly where it stops.

Export what you have

winget can write the apps it knows about to a single JSON file:

winget export -o apps.json

That walks your installed packages, keeps the ones winget can identify by ID, and records them. Add --include-versions if you want to pin exact versions rather than take the latest on restore. Keep apps.json somewhere you control — a USB stick, your own sync folder, anywhere.

Reinstall on the new machine

On the fresh install, point winget at that file:

winget import -i apps.json --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreements

It reads the list and installs each app in turn, no clicking through installers. Two flags worth knowing: --ignore-unavailable skips anything winget can't find instead of stopping, and --ignore-versions takes the current version when a pinned one is gone.

For apps winget tracks, this is the good part. It genuinely turns a weekend into a few minutes.

What winget misses

Three things, and each one bites.

Microsoft Store apps. winget export only serializes packages from the winget source. Store apps come from a different source and don't make it into the file, so they silently drop off your new machine. This is a documented limitation, not a bug you can flag away. I wrote up the details separately: why winget export skips your Store apps.

Anything outside a winget source. Portable apps, tools you installed by hand, anything not registered where winget can see it — none of it is captured.

Your settings. This is the one that matters most. winget reinstalls the application; it does not bring your configuration. Your VS Code setup, your Git config, your terminal profile, your keybindings all start from scratch. You get a fresh copy of the app, not your app.

There is also no safety net. winget import installs; it doesn't take a restore point first. If something goes sideways there's nothing to roll back to.

Where Endstate fits

I hit all three of these often enough that I built Endstate around them. It uses winget as the install engine, so you get the same reliable reinstall. On top of that it detects Microsoft Store apps, backs up settings for 300+ apps (editors and IDEs, terminals, creative apps like Blender and DaVinci Resolve, media players, emulators, note apps like Obsidian, and more), and writes the whole thing to one portable file. Before it changes any settings it takes a backup, so a bad restore is one click to undo. It's free, open source, and needs no account: substratesystems.io/endstate.

winget is a good building block. For "reinstall my apps," it gets you most of the way. For "make this new machine mine again," it's the first step, not the whole job.