Bench

A portable software development environment for Windows

About Bench

Bench is an isolated and portable environment for a selection of graphical programs and command-line tools. Bench allows you to download and run many programs without actually installing them into Windows. It comes with a graphical user interface to provide a comfortable entry into the environment.

Usage Scenarios

Whenever you need an environment with command-line support and your tools on the PATH, and you want to replicate, version control, or share this environment including the installed tools, Bench can be a huge help for you.

Apps

Bench comes with libraries, which contain descriptions of Windows applications. Such a description is called an app definition and contains the name, the download URL of the setup package, the version, and more. Bench uses the app definitions to download and install the apps in the Bench environment.

This documentation is currently work in progress, do not expect it to be complete. Take a look at the related GitHub issue to watch the progress.