Still a WIP, but here's the deets so far:
## No more throwing canceled tokens
Throwing exceptions is expensive and since we essentially cancel tokens
anytime someone is typing beyond the debounce, we could be throwing
exceptions a ton during search. Since we don't care about those past
executions, now they just `return`.
## Reduced number of apps returned in search
While users can specify how many apps (no limit, 1, 5), if they specify
no limit, we hard limit it at 10. For a few reasons, fuzzy search gets
_really_ fuzzy sometimes and gives answers that users would think is
just plain wrong and they make the response list longer than it needs to
be.
## Fuzzy search: still fuzzy, but faster
Replaced `StringMatcher` class with `FuzzyStringMatcher`.
`FuzzyStringMatcher` is a C# port by @zadjii-msft of the Rust port by
@lhecker for [microsoft/edit](https://github.com/microsoft/edit), which
I believe originally came from [VS
Code](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode). It's a whole fuzzy rabbit
hole. But it's faster than the `StringMatcher` class it replaced.
## Fallbacks, you need to fall back
"In the beginning, fallbacks were created. This had made many people
very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy jokes aside, fallbacks are one cause of
slower search results. A few modifications have been made to get them
out of the way without reverting their ability to do things dynamically.
1. Fallbacks are no longer scored and will always* appear at the bottom
of the search results
2. In updating their search text, we now use a cancellation token to
stop processing previous searches when a new keypress is recorded.
## * But Calculator & Run are special
So, remember when I said that all fallbacks will not be ranked and
always display at the bottom of the results? Surprise, some will be
ranked and displayed based on that score. Specifically, Calculator and
Run are fallbacks that are whitelisted from the restrictions mentioned
above. They will continue to act as they do today.
We do have the ability to add future fallbacks to that whitelist as
well.
---
## Current preview
Updated: 2025-09-24
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c74c9a8e-e438-4101-840b-1408d2acaefd
---
Closes#39763Closes#39239Closes#39948Closes#38594Closes#40330
_We already fixed one leak, yes, but what about second leak?_
We already clean up `ListItemViewModel`s for a page when the page is
navigated away from. However, if the page updates it's items, we would
never actually `Cleanup` the old items. We'd just lose them, and never
unregister their event handlers. The objects would just leak forever.
This builds on the work in #41166, to do two things:
* Cleanup items that were removed from our list, when we actually update
`Items`. This involved a change to `Toolkit.ListHelpers`, to let us know
which items were removed from the list during `InPlaceUpdateList`
* Cleanup items that are thrown out when we cancel a FetchItems. Those
items were constructed, and might have registered event handlers, even
if we never actually put them into `Items`.
_Targets #41166_
Closes#39837
Tested with the evil sample from #41158, and loading thousands and
thousands of items no longer causes us to leak memory like we're
Deepwater Horizon.
_⚠️ targets #39955_
This adds history support to the new run page.
* It'll initialize the history with the history from the run dialog, if
there is any.
* Any new commands that are run, or files/dirs that are opened will also
get added to the history
* history will persist across reboots
Windows Command Palette ("CmdPal") is the next iteration of PowerToys Run. With extensibility at its core, the Command Palette is your one-stop launcher to start _anything_.
By default, CmdPal is bound to <kbd>Win+Alt+Space</kbd>.
----
This brings the current preview version of CmdPal into the upstream PowerToys repo. There are still lots of bugs to work out, but it's reached the state we're ready to start sharing it with the world. From here, we can further collaborate with the community on the features that are important, and ensuring that we've got a most robust API to enable developers to build whatever extensions they want.
Most of the built-in PT Run modules have already been ported to CmdPal's extension API. Those include:
* Installed apps
* Shell commands
* File search (powered by the indexer)
* Windows Registry search
* Web search
* Windows Terminal Profiles
* Windows Services
* Windows settings
There are a couple new extensions built-in
* You can now search for packages on `winget` and install them right from the palette. This also powers searching for extensions for the palette
* The calculator has an entirely new implementation. This is currently less feature complete than the original PT Run one - we're looking forward to updating it to be more complete for future ingestion in Windows
* "Bookmarks" allow you to save shortcuts to files, folders, and webpages as top-level commands in the palette.
We've got a bunch of other samples too, in this repo and elsewhere
### PowerToys specific notes
CmdPal will eventually graduate out of PowerToys to live as its own application, which is why it's implemented just a little differently than most other modules. Enabling CmdPal will install its `msix` package.
The CI was minorly changed to support CmdPal version numbers independent of PowerToys itself. It doesn't make sense for us to start CmdPal at v0.90, and in the future, we want to be able to rev CmdPal independently of PT itself.
Closes#3200, closes#3600, closes#7770, closes#34273, closes#36471, closes#20976, closes#14495
-----
TODOs et al
**Blocking:**
- [ ] Images and descriptions in Settings and OOBE need to be properly defined, as mentioned before
- [ ] Niels is on it
- [x] Doesn't start properly from PowerToys unless the fix PR is merged.
- https://github.com/zadjii-msft/PowerToys/pull/556 merged
- [x] I seem to lose focus a lot when I press on some limits, like between the search bar and the results.
- This is https://github.com/zadjii-msft/PowerToys/issues/427
- [x] Turned off an extension like Calculator and it was still working.
- Need to get rid of that toggle, it doesn't do anything currently
- [x] `ListViewModel.<FetchItems>` crash
- Pretty confident that was fixed in https://github.com/zadjii-msft/PowerToys/pull/553
**Not blocking / improvements:**
- Show the shortcut through settings, as mentioned before, or create a button that would open CmdPalette settings.
- When PowerToys starts, CmdPalette is always shown if enabled. That's weird when just starting PowerToys/ logging in to the computer with PowerToys auto-start activated. I think this should at least be a setting.
- Needing to double press a result for it to do the default action seems quirky. If one is already selected, I think just pressing should be enough for it to do the action.
- This is currently a setting, though we're thinking of changing the setting even more: https://github.com/zadjii-msft/PowerToys/issues/392
- There's no URI extension. Was surprised when typing a URL that it only proposed a web search.
- [x] There's no System commands extension. Was expecting to be able to quickly restart the computer by typing restart but it wasn't there.
- This is in PR https://github.com/zadjii-msft/PowerToys/pull/452
---------
Co-authored-by: joadoumie <98557455+joadoumie@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Jordi Adoumie <jordiadoumie@microsoft.com>
Co-authored-by: Mike Griese <zadjii@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Niels Laute <niels.laute@live.nl>
Co-authored-by: Michael Hawker <24302614+michael-hawker@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Stefan Markovic <57057282+stefansjfw@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Seraphima <zykovas91@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Jaime Bernardo <jaime@janeasystems.com>
Co-authored-by: Kristen Schau <47155823+krschau@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Eric Johnson <ericjohnson327@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Ethan Fang <ethanfang@microsoft.com>
Co-authored-by: Yu Leng (from Dev Box) <yuleng@microsoft.com>
Co-authored-by: Clint Rutkas <clint@rutkas.com>
