microsoft / powertoys

Five of the nine — add-adaptive-card-form, add-dock-band, add-extension-settings, add-fallback-commands, and publish-extension — are a matched set for building a Command Palette extension: form UI, a persistent toolbar widget, a settings page, catch-all search behavior, and finally packaging the result for the Microsoft Store or WinGet. A sixth, winmd-api-search, is a general Windows API lookup useful for any Windows app feature, not specific to Command Palette. The remaining two are PowerToys' own contributor tooling — release-note-generation drafts release notes from GitHub milestones and Azure DevOps builds, and wpf-to-winui3-migration guides converting a PowerToys module from WPF to WinUI 3, a rewrite the project already has under way. The ninth skill in the repository carries no description in its own frontmatter, so we have no material to say what it does.

That divide matters because the two audiences barely overlap. Someone who installs PowerToys for FancyZones, Color Picker, or PowerToys Run — the utilities in the README's own grid of 30-plus tools — gets nothing from any of these nine; none of them touches an end-user utility. They are aimed instead at developers extending Command Palette itself, and at contributors working on PowerToys' own source tree.

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Six of the nine assume a Windows development environment already in place — Visual Studio, the Windows App SDK, a checked-out Command Palette extension or PowerToys source tree — before any of them produce anything. Two more need an account key: publish-extension needs a Microsoft Store Partner Center account, and drafting release notes pulls from an Azure DevOps project needing its own credential. Only winmd-api-search runs with nothing beyond a Windows machine.