Microsoft made some drastic decisions with Windows 11, leaving many users, including me, livid. Even after nearly five years since its launch, Windows 11 has a lot of unresolved issues and missing features. PowerToys was a very thoughtful revival that helped soften the loss of features to some extent. It kept adding new tools and today has a great set of utilities, the best of which is the Command Palette. It fixed two main eyesores in Windows 11 for me, and I'll keep using it until Microsoft implements the feature naturally.

Command Palette is a revamped version of the old PowerToys Run, with several notable improvements and a new dock that serves as a true taskbar replacement. Microsoft has some ideas about restoring the taskbar to the previous version, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Command Palette’s dock solves taskbar woes

The native taskbar is lackluster

It was one of the surprising feature add-ons in PowerToys for me because it focuses more on mini-tools and integrations rather than a full-blown taskbar. Command Palette is already a floating bar that appears when you press the shortcut key. Adding a fixed taskbar to a floating, temporarily appearing tool seems out of place, but I have a different purpose for it.

The first noticeable problem with the Windows taskbar is that it’s locked at one location. You cannot move it unless you use a third-party UI tweaking tool or a registry hack. Both of these techniques are hit-or-miss, and Microsoft has a habit of making tweaking tools incompatible with newer updates.

Explorer Patcher, a popular tool for moving the taskbar from the bottom position, became incompatible after Windows 25H2 was released. It was more of a developer’s fault, but it doesn’t matter, as you go back to square one with the taskbar’s location.

Command Palette’s new dock works surprisingly well because it supports repositioning. You can move it to the top, on either side, or to the bottom. It's such a trivial thing that a third-party tool thought of, but Microsoft, the tool’s parent company, didn’t.

So what? Isn’t it just a taskbar that can move anywhere now? What’s there to sing praises about? The difference between the PowerToys dock and the native taskbar is in customization capabilities. PowerToys dock delivers granular customization options that go beyond the usual color and adapt to the theme capabilities.

You can choose to add an image as a taskbar background and make it more personal than ever. I hate a plain-looking taskbar with the default accent color, and the dock makes it possible. You can also change the visual material to acrylic or transparent, like the Windows 7 era’s Aero theme. There are further deep customization options for the dock background to make it truly unique. But will Windows ever support such taskbar modifications? I highly doubt it.

The dock also adds support for pinning icons. So, you can pin whatever you want to stay on the taskbar. The right side shows hardware stats with clear icons and a date and time icon. I'm one of those users who love to take a peek at resource consumption, and having that on the taskbar is really nice. I don't have to add a third-party app to display network speed or memory usage. The left side is where your icons go; you can pin anything from apps to control panel applets, Command Palette tools, and more.

Another unnoticed benefit is that I don't need to deal with Microsoft promotions. My icons can live on the dock and won't include the bloatware Microsoft casually ships with each update, like the widget board and Copilot. The vertical orientation is a bit wide, but newer updates can fix or add more controls for the dock.

Windows search is a mess

Command Palette soothes the pain

Windows includes a search tool on the taskbar, but it's a “promotion-first, search-second” kind of tool. When I launch Windows search, it just opens a UI that's majorly occupied by Bing content. To add more pain, the tool tries to include web results in the search, making it way slower than it should be. I could even tolerate slow searches, but the sheer use of the tool as a promotional banner and the GUI approach make it a big no for me. The Command Palette is leaps and bounds beyond Windows search, and I don’t even use it anymore.

Command Palette is quite the opposite because it searches for files without adding any such burden. It's not just a search bar anymore and does many things like calculations, running commands, finding files, installing apps from the Winget repo, and supports extensions. It’s the supercharged search bar that Windows search can never be.

Why should I open another app, a Terminal instance, or a web browser to do things that a floating bar can do? PowerToys manages everything without being a burden on resources. You can even expand the features by installing more extensions from the Microsoft Store. It’s more than a fancy floating launcher that solves not one, but many problems in Windows.

Windows needs to improve

When a store app supersedes the feature set of a mainstream OS like Windows, it’s not good news. My pain of dealing with a pathetically slow search isn’t an isolated case, and using Command Palette fixes and improves it. When there’s already a basic search feature inside the Start menu, why can’t Microsoft focus on adding a powerful tool like Command Palette?

The new dock solves another big Windows 11 problem, and it makes me wonder how it could be that the same company is behind the OS and PowerToys. There are promises of restoring the taskbar position settings and a few minor changes, but those will take their own sweet time to arrive. I doubt they’ll be better than the things PowerToys offers.