winapp-find-ui

This is an agent-first command

find-ui was designed for you, the agent — not primarily for a human browsing a gallery. It exists because the failure mode it prevents is an agent-specific one: writing plausible-looking XAML for a control whose real markup, properties, or namespace differ from what you recall. Treat it as the source of truth for WinUI markup:

• Fetch a real sample before writing WinUI markup. If you are about to hand-write XAML for a control you have not just looked at, search for it first and fetch the scenario with --id. The returned code comes from the shipping WinUI 3 Gallery and Windows Community Toolkit, so it compiles.
• Prefer it over recall and over web search. It returns code from a pinned, cached corpus of the real galleries rather than a blog post of unknown vintage.
• Use --json. Search, --id, and --list all emit stable structured shapes, and every failure — including parser errors — is a flat {"error": "..."} on stdout with a non-zero exit code, so you can branch on the result on every path.
• Pair it with winapp find-api. find-ui gives you working markup; find-api verifies any property you then change or add.

Humans can and do run it directly, and everything below works fine typed by hand. But the ergonomics (compact search → --id fetch, --json, exit codes) are tuned for agent loops.

When to use

Use this skill when building a WinUI 3 UI and you need to discover which control fits an intent and get a real, working code example — without leaving the CLI or guessing at control names and APIs.

winapp find-ui searches the WinUI 3 Gallery and the Windows Community Toolkit (plus a few curated core patterns) and returns a working code snippet plus where it came from. A third source, the microsoft-ui-reactor ReactorGallery, is opt-in: it is excluded from a normal search and is only searched when you pass --source reactor.

• WinUI-only. The corpus is WinUI 3 Gallery + Windows Community Toolkit (+ Reactor when opted in). It does not cover WPF, WinForms, or other UI frameworks.
• Reactor is opt-in and for Reactor projects only. Reactor is a C#-only declarative/MVU framework — its samples can't paste into a standard dotnet new winui XAML + code-behind app, so a default search deliberately omits it. Only reach for --source reactor when you're actually building a Reactor app.
• Result shape varies by source. Gallery and Toolkit scenarios return XAML, C#, or both (one-sided samples are kept); Reactor scenarios are C#-only declarative WinUI (no XAML).
• Distinct from winapp ui search, which searches a running app's UI tree via UI Automation — unrelated to control/sample discovery.

Front-load lookups, then code. Search for each feature you need up front, pick the right control and scenario id, fetch its full code with --id, then write your XAML — don't interleave search-and-code.

Workflow

# 1. Search compactly to find the control + its scenario ids (WinUI-only)
winapp find-ui "tabbed layout"

# 2. Fetch the full XAML + C# (and prerequisite notes) for the best match
winapp find-ui --id gallery-tabview-1

# 3. Batch: fetch several scenarios at once
winapp find-ui --id gallery-tabview-1 --id toolkit-tabbedcommandbar-1

Examples

# Natural-intent search
winapp find-ui "a card with an image and title"
winapp find-ui "swipeable list rows"

# Restrict to one source
winapp find-ui "settings card" --source toolkit
winapp find-ui "color picker" --source gallery

# Reactor is opt-in: excluded from a normal search, only searched with --source reactor
# (use this only for a Reactor/MVU project — its C#-only samples don't fit standard XAML apps)
winapp find-ui "flex layout" --source reactor

# Return more candidates
winapp find-ui "navigation" --max 6

# Browse everything (heavy — prefer search; excludes opt-in Reactor)
winapp find-ui --list

# Force a corpus refresh from GitHub
winapp find-ui "info bar" --refresh

# Search the built-in core patterns fully offline (no network, no fetch)
winapp find-ui "file picker" --source core

Agent-friendly output

Add --json for a structured, grounded result an agent can consume in one shot:

winapp find-ui "color picker" --json

• Search → { query, matchCount, matches: [ { source, control, score, description?, scenarios: [ { id, header } ] } ] } — compact; use the id values to fetch code.
• --id → { results: [ { id, found, content } ] } — content is the code markdown block (XAML and/or C# for Gallery/Toolkit; C# only for Reactor).
• --list → { count, items: [ { id, header } ] }.
• On error, --json emits { "error": "..." } on stdout with a non-zero exit code.

Notes & tips

• One mode at a time. A search query, --id, and --list are mutually exclusive — combining them is rejected. --source applies to search only.
• Reactor is opt-in. A normal search and --list cover Gallery + Toolkit + core only. Pass --source reactor to search Reactor (reactor-only results); a reactor-<control>-<n> --id still fetches even without the flag. Skipping Reactor by default keeps its C#-only samples from outranking usable controls in a standard XAML app.
• Everything works offline. The Gallery/Toolkit/Reactor corpus ships inside the CLI, so search, --list, and --id all work with no network access — including on a first run in a sandbox or behind a proxy that blocks raw.githubusercontent.com. When GitHub is reachable the CLI refreshes from it and caches per-user under <global .winapp>/cache/find-ui (refreshed at most every 24 hours, or on demand with --refresh); the built-in corpus is a floor, never a ceiling, so live data always wins. --source core searches the curated built-in patterns and never touches the network at all.
• Check the corpus provenance when it matters. --json carries "corpus": "network" (fetched this run), "cache" (this machine's earlier fetch), or "embedded" (served from the corpus built into the CLI — either the fetch failed or the local cache predates the bake). Only "embedded" may lag upstream — re-run with --refresh if a sample looks out of date.
• Scenario ids are stable within a cached corpus and case-insensitive — GALLERY-TABVIEW-1 resolves the same as gallery-tabview-1. Gallery/Toolkit/Reactor ids look like gallery-<control>-<n> / toolkit-<control>-<n> / reactor-<control>-<n>; the <source>- prefix disambiguates controls that exist in more than one gallery (e.g. ColorPicker). Curated core patterns use a plain descriptive id with no <source>-<control>-<n> shape (e.g. file-picker-desktop, live-charts); fetch them the same way with --id, and browse them with --source core.
• --json is always JSON. With --json, every failure — including argument/parser errors such as a non-integer --max — is emitted as a flat {"error": "..."} object on stdout with a non-zero exit code, so an agent can parse the result on every path.
• Exit codes are script-friendly: 0 on a hit, 1 on no match / error.
• Keep queries focused (one feature per query) — the lexical ranker rewards specific phrasing. Batch multiple focused queries rather than one broad one.

Upstream is the source of truth

Which samples exist is upstream's call. winapp adds no samples of its own to the Gallery or Toolkit corpus and does not rewrite an individual sample's implementation to its own taste.

Snippets are still processed: they're cleaned, truncated to a readable length, and event handlers with no accompanying code-behind are stripped. So treat a result as upstream's sample, mechanically extracted — not as a byte-for-byte copy of the file in their repo. Most samples paste and compile as-is; a few reference a page or type of their own that you'll need to define.

Where a control has a known pitfall, or two controls are easy to confuse, the CLI says so in the Important and Family notes attached to the result. Read those — they carry guidance that isn't in the sample itself, and they're winapp's, not upstream's.

If a sample is missing or genuinely wrong upstream, report it against the source the result is tagged with: [gallery] → WinUI-Gallery, [toolkit] → Windows Community Toolkit. If the defect looks like truncation, a missing handler, or markup that won't parse, that's winapp's extraction — report it here instead.

Related skills

• winapp-ui-automation — inspect and drive a running app's UI tree (a different job from discovering controls to write).

CLI reference

Run winapp find-ui --help for current command options, or winapp --cli-schema for the complete machine-readable command schema.