Ever since I discovered Flow Launcher on my Windows PC, I've become a big advocate for quick launchers like this. I rarely use the Start menu on Windows or the launchpad on macOS these days. While Flow Launcher has remained my favorite option on Windows 11, PowerToys Run is another great contender for those wanting a quick launcher, and recently, Microsoft introduced Command Palette — the successor to PowerToys Run that wants to take those capabilities even further.

Of course, I had to try it out and see if it's actually better than the existing solution. Both Command Palette and PowerToys Run are still available side by side, so you can choose your preference, but I imagine PowerToys Run will fall by the wayside eventually, so Command Palette has a lot to live up to.

The UI

Command Palette feels more robust

One of the big changes from PowerToys Run to Command Palette seems to be the UI, which is made to be a bit more visually appealing this time around. Of course, there's only so much you can change with a relatively simple search bar, but Command Palette uses much more colorful iconography and more animations, though that latter part is a bit of a mixed bag for me.

Animations can look nice, but the point of a quick launcher is to be instantly responsive. Command Palette introduces some short transitions when you trigger specific extensions or back out of them, and while it's not much, it does make things feel a bit slower. To be fair, the search bar responds immediately after you activate an extension, but there's a split second of a transition on screen that I think makes it feel slower and kind of slows down the user. An option to disable this would be appreciated.

On the flip side, the way settings are handled makes a lot more sense now. With PowerToys Run, if you wanted to change settings related to your extensions or PowerToys Run itself, you'd have to go through the main PowerToys window, and there's no way to easily access that specific section from within PowerToys Run.

Command Palette feels like a completely separate entity from the rest of PowerToys, with its own settings window that's available directly in the quick launch UI. Here, you can manage extensions, the various commands they can use, and general Command Palette settings such as whether it should always launch to the default search bar or restore the previous session. If the goal of a launcher is to do things faster, having everything you need directly within that UI makes the most sense.

More integrations, fewer integrations

There are some trade-offs

A launcher like this lives and dies by its integrations, and with Command Palette, Microsoft seems to have some good ideas to make it even more useful than PowerToys Run. Most of the basics you'd want are here: launching apps, solving equations using the Calculator app, or running terminal commands all work. But there are a lot of additions, too.

One of the big ones Microsoft had teased beforehand was integration with WinGet, or the Windows Package Manager. That means you can search for apps you want to install with a friendly GUI rather than relying on the terminal. This does make it more approachable, though I have noticed that searches are much slower this way than just using the terminal commands, so hopefully this is something that can be polished up a bit for future releases. Command Palette also makes it easy to search for new extensions for itself through WinGet and the Microsoft Store, and there's even an option for creating a project for a new extension yourself. Extensibility seems to be a much bigger deal for Command Palette than it ever was with PowerToys Run, and that's great news.

However, at this stage, Command Palette is missing a lot from PowerToys Run, much more so than what it adds. Command Palette doesn't have the ability to convert units yet, it can't launch other PowerToys tools like Run can, it can't open URLs directly from the search bar, among other features that PowerToys Run offers that are missing from its successor. Even in terms of third-party extensions, some big ones are missing, such as the ability to search your files with Everything.

Obviously, it's still very early days for Command Palette, but it's also clear why Microsoft didn't immediately sunset PowerToys Run. I would still rather use the old tool while the new one is missing so many features. Though this also makes me wonder if the platform really needed to be replaced in this way, rather than just building on top of what PowerToys Run already offered.

Less customization

Some options are still missing

PowerToys Run may not have been my favorite launcher, but one thing it does very well is that it's highly customizable to meet very specific preferences. If you dive into the settings page for PowerToys Run, you can tweak everything from whether the activation shortcut should work when using full-screen apps to the input smoothing delay, or how many results should be shown without having to scroll. That's in addition to settings for individual extensions, like the priority level of search results from that extension, or even more specific settings like which number formatting should be used with the calculator.

Command Palette offers almost none of that. There are some options available to customize the experience, but it's all much more streamlined and basic. None of the options I just mentioned are available in Command Palette, meaning you're limited to more basic things like changing activation shortcuts and aliases, some behaviors related to the keyboard and mouse, and that's about it. The fine-tuning of search results is almost completely gone.

This is a big step down, but again, it can probably be chalked up to the fact that Command Palette is still new and unfinished. Still, it makes it hard to justify making the transition right now.

I'm sticking with Flow Launcher for now

Command Palette is looking very promising in terms of what it might be able to do, but as it stands, it's hard to recommend it over PowerToys Run. The big appeal of Command Palette is in its promise: the fact that it's much easier to find extensions directly from with Command Palette, and the fact you can even create a project for a new extension yourself suggests to me that Microsoft is planning to make extensibility a much bigger part of this platform, and that's very exciting.

But as I mentioned at the top, Flow Launcher was already my favorite launcher, and the fact that Command Palette couldn't even beat PowerToys Run in my eyes is somewhat disappointing. Hopefully, time will make it so that Command Palette can stand toe-to-toe with the best launchers out there, but for now, it's more fun as a glimpse into the future than it is a truly great launcher. Still, I recommend checking it out below, and maybe passing feedback along to Microsoft so that it can become better.