Paul Thurrott (7:42)
Okay, so that's Winget. And that's been around for, you know, two, three years. It works really well. There's been more and more apps added to the store, et cetera, et cetera. But recently Microsoft announced something called Store cli. And the way that they explained it is that this is a tool for developers, end users. It provides app discovery, install and update capabilities. So it sounds a lot like winget, but that discovery bit is actually most of the new stuff. So we'll do that one last. But it only works with Windows Store apps. It only works in Windows 11 if you have the Windows Store installed, which of course you do. And the way that you get to it is with the Store command. Right now, it got cut off there at the top, but it's got kind of a function, semi graphical or, you know, text mode, graphics kind of display here. My theory is that Store CLI is probably about AI agents, frankly, because there's a lot of stuff going on here. And as we'll see toward the end, because you can ask it questions about what's in the store, it seems like the type of thing that AI would want to know, where you could say something like, hey, is there a free app like Photoshop or something? So we'll do that, we'll do that example later on. But like winget, you get a nice list of the commands and the options and so forth that you have available to you. It's got a nicer display, right. It's kind of formatted a little more nicely than winget is. So, okay, what are we going to do with this one? So same thing. It works a lot like Winget, right? So we can do store search. And here again, they're going to give you options that you can use. Again, nicer presentation, still text mode, obviously. Right. So I'll just do. I'll do the thing we just did. I know this is. Well, see what it does actually. So store search, Google Chrome. Well, actually, I probably have to put that in quotes. Let me just do Chrome. I'll just do it like that. It'll be easy. And this thing will search the store. And this is interesting too, right? So Google Chrome is not in the store, but what it gave us was apps that are like Google Chrome that are in the store. So Firefox, Opera, Brave, DuckDuckGo, et cetera. So that's actually. That's interesting. That is different. We could do something. I used Brave before, I'll do that one again. So store search, Brave should come up with Brave, right? And then the other apps. And it's the same code because this is the identifier, the product ID that we use in the store. And so it's the same thing. If I wanted to install this, I think we do install. And you can see you're. We're supposed to give it the name and I could do Brave and I'm not going to do that. But, you know, again, it works very much like winget does in this capacity. Updating, same thing. Well, similar, I should say. So Update. And the way that this works is this lets you update an individual app. So I could say something like, let's see if that's actually not going to work. I don't have the code. So let me grab a code for an app. I think this is Brave, in fact, and it will look for updates for this particular app. It's already up to date. There's nothing to do. But if there was an update, it would do that. But what if you want to do what I would want to do, which is update everything? There's actually a separate command. So if we go back to Store. Let me scroll up. Well, actually, I don't have to scroll up. I can see it right here. It says update, but there's also updates. And this is going to check for updates for all apps. Right. And the way this works is actually really interesting. So type in store updates. It's going to check for updates depending on when I've done this. This sometimes does take a little bit of time, so we will wait. But eventually what you're going to see here is it will tell you. It'll tell me which updates are available and it will actually offer just to update them all and it will give you a yes, no choice. Sorry. Nope. There it goes. Okay. So similar to winget, but a much nicer interface and you get this option just yes or no to run the update across all those things. I'm going to say no. But if you do say yes, it's interesting. It actually goes right back to the command line. You can type another command and it runs the updates in the background. So actually pretty nice. So yes, nicer. Looking slightly different in some ways. If we go back and look at the interface again, you can see there's some additional stuff, though. And I want to talk about this browse stuff, because I think this is what makes me believe that this might have something to do with AI agents, you know, kind of controlling the store. Right. So they have these different ways to look at what's in the store. So if I. I'm just going to copy that to the clipboard. So browse apps. So if I say store, browse apps. Not much there, but it gives me some help. I need something additional here. There's a lot of options for filtering, category, subcategories, page, etc. But just to keep it simple, I will say top free. And what this is going to do is give me this, you know, nice presentation of the top. I don't know what that is. 20 or so free apps that are available in the store and it's going to change every day, I would imagine. But today as we record this, you can see which ones are at the top of the list. Slowly, WhatsApp, Spotify, iTunes, which is insane, by the way, But Discord chat, GPT, Windows Scan, which is a Windows 8 level or era app, which is kind of interesting. You can also look for categories, right? And so I could just say store and I think it's just app categories. There's different commands like this for games too. I'll stick to apps for this. But this gives you a list of the available categories. So let's back scroll here so you can see what those look like and the subcategories. Interesting. And then you could say something like and I'll just copy paste this and because, because make this a little easier but the wrong place and you know, store, browse apps, top free, but only in the category of music. And now you can see it's Spotify, itunes, Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, et cetera, et cetera. So that's interesting. I also like this one. There's. There's something called similar, right? And so if you just type in similar, it's going to. It tells you you need to find similar things like this. Now we saw this sort of for web browsers earlier because Chrome wasn't in the store. But I'll just try something a little different, you know, Chrome or a store similar and then say Photoshop, right? So Photoshop is obviously an image editing application. And this is interesting too because it's giving me choices. So I typed Photoshop. It wasn't sure which Photoshop I meant. There were four things called Photoshop that are available to it from the store. There's the straight up Photoshop, Photoshop or Photo. Well, Photoshop Express, which I apparently now is a different name, but Also Photoshop Elements and then the version of Photoshop Elements that's bundled with Premiere Elements. So you can actually use the arrow keys to choose which one you mean. So I'll keep it on the first one. I mean Photoshop, I guess. So it's going to find apps in the store that are similar to Photoshop. Now, the first couple are literally Photoshop, but. Well, actually not. But not the one I chose. Right. So it's the other Adobe apps that are like Photoshop Cap Cut, Creative Cloud, which does include Photoshop, Pixar, Canva, et cetera. And you can see over here on the side, it's also. It's not sorted by, but it shows you which are free and which are paid. Because one of the other filters I'm not going to do it here, but one of the other filters you could do is say, well, I want this thing again, but I only want the free, you know, free alternatives or something like that. So there's some cool functionality here. I It's not clear to me why Microsoft didn't just update Winget to do this. I don't know if this means anything about the future of Winget. There's a lot of overlap, but there's also unique functionality here that I think is kind of cool. So maybe as 2026 goes on, we'll learn more about this. This just happened as I recorded this. It was announced in a blog post aimed at developers, but as Microsoft said, it's for users and developers and anyone could use this. You could write a batch file just to install store apps similar to the one I use for Winget. But I need web apps too, so that's not going to help too, too much, but at least for me. But it's something, something to keep your eye on. We're starting to see some interesting updates to Windows 11 this year that aren't necessarily superfluous or kind of fun UI things or AI or whatever. It's just. Just, you know, kind of bread and butter, you know, actual useful productivity things. And so this is kind of interesting. I this came out of nowhere, but I think it's pretty cool. So hopefully, hopefully you found this interesting. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about that at TWIT tv. H O W thank you for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you're not a member, please do consider joining. You can learn more about that at TWIT TV Club twit. Thank you. See you next week.
