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Feature idea: automatically detect installed apps and compress them

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
visualbasic
Domain
desktop, operating-systems

Research direction

Start by examining CompactGUI’s existing manual path-selection workflow, then research how Windows exposes installed applications through Control Panel and Settings. Define how applications and install directories would be listed, how checkboxes would control compression, and which system or non-compressible applications are excluded. Done means users can review detected applications, select them, and process the selection safely.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi,

First of all, thanks for CompactGUI, it is an awesome tool and I use it a lot for system optimization.

I had an idea that could make the workflow much easier when dealing with a lot of installed applications, and that could nicely complement the feature discussed in #580.

Right now, adding paths manually works fine when you only have a few folders to compress.
But when you want to optimize an entire system with many installed programs, it quickly becomes quite tedious to browse for each install directory one by one.

It would be really nice if CompactGUI could automatically detect installed applications, for example from Control Panel > Programs and Features or from Windows Settings > Installed Apps, and then present them in a list.

From there, the user could simply select which applications they want to compress using checkboxes and let CompactGUI handle the rest automatically.

System or critical Windows applications could of course be excluded by default, or skipped if they are not compressible.

This would save a lot of time, reduce manual errors, and make CompactGUI even more powerful for users who like to optimize their systems thoroughly.

Looking forward to what’s next!
(And if my English sounds a bit off, please excuse me 😅🇫🇷)

Thanks again for the great work!

Dominant language
Visual Basic .NET
Stars
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Forks
343
Avg merge
3d 18h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

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