# How to see all installed packages? + a few other \`Pkg\` related questions

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-see-all-installed-packages-a-few-other-pkg-related-questions/1231
**Category:** New to Julia
**Created:** [December 31, 2016, 7:01pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-see-all-installed-packages-a-few-other-pkg-related-questions/1231 "2016-12-31T19:01:15Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3

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### Author: ![stevengj](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stevengj/32/71_2.png) [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)
#### Post date: [December 31, 2016, 7:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-see-all-installed-packages-a-few-other-pkg-related-questions/1231/3 "2016-12-31T19:17:51Z")

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> [@chobbes](#):
>
> I have more than a hundred packages installed. But Pkg.installed() only lists some 40 due to the size of the terminal window. How can I see all installed packages?
> 
> Also, how can I have the installed packages printed alphabetically using Pkg.installed()? It’s hard to pick ham from peas.

`sort(collect(Pkg.installed()))` will print them in sorted order. `show(STDOUT, "text/plain", sort(collect(Pkg.installed())))` will print them all, but it would be nice to have something better by default.

> [@chobbes](#):
>
> It takes more than 5 minutes on my machine for Pkg.installed() to return. Is this normal?

Are you using Windows? Julia’s package system currently uses lots of little files in the METADATA repo to store metadata, which is pretty slow on Windows (it was even worse before we switched to libgit in Julia 0.5). At some point we are hoping to switch to a new package metadata system that will eliminate this problem ([https://github.com/JuliaLang/Juleps/blob/master/Pkg3.md](https://github.com/JuliaLang/Juleps/blob/master/Pkg3.md)).

> [@chobbes](#):
>
> Is there a way to see all registered Julia packages on the METADATA git page: [GitHub - JuliaLang/METADATA.jl: Metadata for registered Julia packages up to Julia v0.6. No longer maintained. Please see https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General instead.](https://github.com/JuliaLang/METADATA.jl). The last 277 packages are not see-able on that page.

Normally I would recommend looking at the listing at [http://pkg.julialang.org/](http://pkg.julialang.org/)

To see the github listing directly you may have to clone the repo, or do `print(readdir(Pkg.dir("METADATA")))` in Julia.

> [@chobbes](#):
>
> I use a package which is registered with METADATA. But I don’t use its tagged version, since it’s too old. I use the development version that I checked out from its git repo. However, each time when I Pkg.update(), the tagged version is installed automatically and overrides the version I intend to use. This really drive me nuts as I have to manually Pkg.rm the tagged version. Is there a way to avoid this?

Normally if you do `Pkg.checkout("somepackage")`, then `update()` will stay on the master release. Is that not working?

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