I can’t stand opening the Microsoft Store. It’s slow to load, confusing to browse, and full of ads for things I don’t care about. Luckily, thanks to a new feature, I don’t have to open the Microsoft Store ever again.
Last week Microsoft announced a brand new command line interface for the Microsoft Store, which you can access right now by opening PowerShell and typing “store.” If the command doesn’t work, make sure you’ve run all of the current Windows 11 updates.
If it does work, you will see a fancy bit of ASCII art along with a list of sub-commands. This tells you how you can search for, install, and even update software with just a few keystrokes.
Linux users are used to installing software from the command line, and Mac users know how to find third party tools for the job, like MAS for the Mac App Store. I can’t recall a mainstream commercial operating system including a way to browse and install software from a commercial app store using only commands.
Microsoft’s implementation is quite nice. For example, you don’t need to know the exact name of the app in order to install something. While testing this new interface, I typed “store install firefox,” not knowing if that would work. The tool searched the store, found the app most likely to match “firefox,” told me the company that made it (Mozilla, in this case), and asked if that was in fact what I wanted to install.
I can’t overstate how easy this makes installing software. Similar services I’ve tested don’t work this way—you need to know the exact name used by the package manager or else you’ll get an error. It’s really great to see this implemented so well.
There are downsides. The tool can only install applications that are offered in the Microsoft Store, which is inherently limiting. A few extremely popular apps, including Google Chrome and Paint.net, aren’t available this way. But plenty of applications are, and you might not know what is and isn’t there. You can type “store search” followed by a query in order to search the store. You can get more details by typing “store show” followed by the name of the application in order to read more about it.
You can also browse the Microsoft Store. The command “store browse-apps” will tell you about a few categories you can look into, including the bestseller lists. Taken together, these commands allow you to do just about everything you can do in the Microsoft Store, but faster.
