winapp-find-ui

A search helper for WinUI 3, Microsoft's framework for building Windows desktop interfaces, that finds matching controls and working examples from official sample collections.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building layouts such as tabs, image cards, or swipeable lists and you need XAML or C# examples. It does not cover WPF or WinForms.
Why use it?
It helps you identify the right control and API without guessing names or searching through samples manually.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/winappcli/winapp-find-ui
Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/winappCli --skill winapp-find-ui
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/winappCli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 148 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,693 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00148 $0.01693
Opus 5 $0.00074 $0.00847
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00339
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00169

Measured 2d ago against content hash 96e9c726e2d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

winapp-find-ui scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/winapp/skills/winapp-find-ui/SKILL.md · 128 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 128 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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

Read the full file on GitHub · 128 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 128 lines · 148 tokens per session scan A 96e9c726e2d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

winapp-find-ui is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/winappCli (1,205 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 148 tokens to every session and 1,693 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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