Many, if not most of these tools contain functionality that is built into other major OSes, and had been for a long time. I don't really understand why Microsoft doesn't include them by default.
It's probably a combination of 1. retaining backwards compatibility with applications that don't interact well with these features and 2. exposing users to behaviors that are hard to understand and undo once they are activated by accident.
Number 2 is fun, I get a call from relatives at least twice a year because their screen was rotated 90 degrees from a keyboard shortcut that was hit when a cat walked across their laptop when the lid was left open. The crazy thing is it's happened 4 times now.
It's not a backwards compatibility thing, PowerToys has been a thing since Windows 95 and we've seen breaking changes in a few iterations of Windows since.
The clue is in the name "Power" -- it's additional functionality for power users. Since Windows generally caters for the lowest common denominator, features like this would be deemed too complicated (sometimes even dangerous) for some folk. So it is an optional addon for power users.
It's just like how WSL, PowerShell, etc aren't installed by default either.
Instead we get “Paint 3D”, “Mixed Reality Portal”, and “Your Phone”. Absolute essentials that I’m certain are chart-toppers in the telemetry activity charts.
It at least used to work with LINE and Discord for me, but I gave up on using it because it's so damn buggy and the Windows side of it uses like 4GB of RAM. And both of those have native desktop clients I can use instead.
Most of the tools are gated behind obscure key combos and are useless for many people. Why not make people install them if they want them? The cost of installing them is less than the cost of learning the hot key memorizations.
These are not fair comparisons. The Mac tools you list here are much more powerful than the Windows counterparts, and there are good enough built-in alternatives (Spotlight, Terminal and the default screenshot tool).
* PowerToys FancyZones - Moom
This isn't fair either. FancyZones is much more powerful; Rectangle is a better comparison.
What is it that Rectangle can do that Moom can't? As a long-time Moom user, I've never come across an example of "amazing thing [other MacOS window management extension] does that Moom doesn't," but I always try to be open.
(There's also the possibility that there are amazing things I wouldn't use, of course. I have discovered that while I like keyboard shortcuts and Moom's hover dropdown for window resizing/movement, I find "drag a window to the screen edge to resize it" to be a maddening anti-feature.)
By keeping little toys like this outside of the main Windows feature set, they stay out of the 500 review and design steps, where any of 5000 people can kill the feature.
There’s a lot of politics too. Something like a unmute button may be “owned” by the liaison to the Teams program management, who in turn want universal unmute to be an Azure service that is incorporated into “Azure Live Office Solutions for Windows (Govcloud) for Business E7”.
Double clicking any unused portion of the title bar will maximize a window within it's current space without going full-screen (the green button). It's not the most intuitive way to do it, but that's a far cry from being impossible out of the box.
Yes.. but how would I know it had I not read about it here? I have to use macs at work and it's filled with "WTF?" moments. Like why the hell would I want to make something fullscreen with the green button on the window title bar, when coming from linux/windows I expect it to maximise the window.. and window maximising is done by some weird incantation.
Installing of applications is done by dragging them into some place, and then there is no feedback about what is happening. And so on and on.
> but how would I know it had I not read about it here?
Presumably you’ve been a windows user long enough, or at least exposed to Windows enough times to have figured out you can double click a title bar in that operating system and maximize a window, so it’s probably not too far of a stretch to guess you would have figured it out in macOS by simply trying to do the same thing
Agreeably macOS is highly opinionated when it comes to “discovering” some of the hidden interaction features, but come on. You really wouldn’t have had any other way to figure how to embiggen a window without without having to come to HN and read the above comment?
That feels like an extreme example for the sake of being oppositional
It's not the same experiece as maximising on Windows. AFAIK, Zoom expands the window to match the content size, and many apps seem to not think you need the full screen.
The only way to replicate the Windows behaviour of truly maximising is to use third-party tools like Rectangle.
It definitely took me some time to get used to the way window management works on the Mac, but now it makes sense to me and I am okay with it. MacOS works better for me when I send my full-screen programs to their own desktop (the green button) than to double-click the title bar like I would in Windows. With the Magic Trackpad swipe navigation available to me, I can easily flip between programs in full-screen mode. Some parts of the operating systems are 1:1 and others need a little bit of mental reprogramming.
I actually think it's bad for an OS to include too many features out of the box. Basically every modern platform has already gone too far in this direction, making computers more difficult for casual users to understand.
Vendors should include only the bare essentials, then let users who want more add their own extras.
Imagine an OS similar to the original Macintosh, or maybe early versions of iOS, but with add-ons that can add features to the global UI. New users have a basic system with easily-understood behaviors, and experienced users can enable the features they need.
In an alternate universe where I believed it was possible to compete with the major vendors, this is the platform I would build...
Disagree. Fancy features are awesome for "normies".
iPhones have a feature where you can create PDFs page by page, using the camera as a scanner. After you snap the photo it offers you a crop and transform tool, and does a little image recognition to assist you and make the edges of the crop tool snap to the page within the photo.
I've found that feature immensely useful in a professional context and (it was a company device) when I gave the phone back I seriously considered switching away from Android for my personal phone.
Little things like that, baked into the OS, make for a really awesome UX.
This to me is actually a problem with how iOS works versus traditional desktops. Almost everything you create is a file, so you could justify putting almost any feature in the files app.
The files app should be exclusively for listing/moving/copying files. Files themselves should be created by and opened with different apps.
This isn't to say apps shouldn't be able to talk to the files app. On macOS, for example, apps can install QuickLook plugins.
> Wouldn't it make more sense for the scanning feature to be its own app, so that users can find it, know what it is, and not activate it accidentally?
It's been a few years since I had that phone so the details are a bit fuzzy but I seem to recall it was very discoverable from the email attachment interface, at the very least.
Problem with a separate app is that it's a separate codebase and thus easier for it to fall to neglect.
> It's been a few years since I had that phone so the details are a bit fuzzy but I seem to recall it was very discoverable from the email attachment interface, at the very least.
That's great if I'm sending an email, but what if I want to upload the documents to a website, or send them via iMessage, or Airdrop them to another Apple device, or print out the scan to effectively make a second paper copy? Do you add the icon to each of these interfaces, taking up screen real estate and adding mental load? (One new icon is never a problem, but do it 30 times and you'll be in a bad spot.)
IMO, Apple's strategy significantly railroads users, while making interfaces ever-more complicated.
> Problem with a separate app is that it's a separate codebase and thus easier for it to fall to neglect.
Yeah, bundling everything into iTunes worked really well for Apple, didn't it? :D
I really don't think we should be making UI decisions based on this.
Over the course of more than a decade, Apple kept adding features to iTunes until the app become horribly slow, confusing, and buggy. Just about everyone hated it.
When Apple finally killed the Mac version of iTunes on stage at WWDC, they basically admitted that they'd tried to cram in too much functionality, by joking that they were considering a Calendar and Web Browser.
Windows is so far past that point now, could just as well pile these on too < edit: I'm actually positive about these tools, MS could do with a little less focus on consumer usecases I think.
> Vendors should include only the bare essentials, then let users who want more add their own extras.
This used to be appealing to me, back when the open-source model seemed to be viable even on macOS and Windows. Now any look at the app store will show you apps performing the most basic, should-be (and often is!) bundled, functionality that cost $5 apiece. No slight against developers, who have a right to make a living, but if I just dropped thousands of dollars on a computer and then had to pay $5 for each small convenience feature I wanted, it would definitely be a significant downgrade in experience. I don't live in the Windows ecosystem any more, but the macOS freeware ecosystem has significantly degraded (and it's not just a matter of “I have to use something old”—due to architecture changes, most of the old stuff doesn't work any more, and, understandably, even if the original maintainer is still keeping it up, they now often charge for the product).
But, that's why I think it's great that PowerToys is made by Microsoft. Just because a feature isn't included in the base OS doesn't mean the same company can't create it.
I actually find it strange how many people I'm seeing crap on PowerToys because you get the features out-of-the-box on other platforms.
First off, macOS is missing its own features such as three-finger tap to middle click and window snapping, and what you get on Linux is going to vary based on your DE.
Second, building something in adds bloat for people who don't use it and can kill off choices of third-party options that might do the feature (subjectively) better (I still see people mad that Apple killed Sherlock by building their own version of it in)
I like the idea of something pluggable, but also with sane and disableable default features that 98% of users will be totally fine with.
Probably because changing stuff in the main OS is pretty complex and needs approval from many different actors at Microsoft.
Releasing a simple utility application on the other hand should be much easier and isn't bound to any release cycle.
Yeah, is it localized to eleven fallback languages, and accessible to blind people, and included in the security threat model? Including anything in Windows costs serious money, so for some niche features you might need to install an out of band, less supported package.
I was about to say "because of the maintenance burden and separation of core and extra features" but then I remembered that half the stuff they added since win2k is borderline useless.
PowerShell, BitLocker, SSH, WinRM, Appx and msix and MDM integration come to mind. I don‘t want to go back to the days where managing Windows meant clicking around in GUIs.
Which would be easily resolved by having them off by default?
Having said that, I don't know how window snapping being on by default isn't incredibly frustrating for someone who is simply trying to precisely position a window near a corner only to have it snap in a way they didn't want it to.
As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31305712), because it’s targeted at a different audience and because it being separate allows it to be iterated and experimented with more quickly. When you have an install-base as large as Windows, you have to be careful with what you include as a built-in feature versus what is an add-on or option (even first party), because a change made for one class of users could be confusing or detrimental to another. This is particularly true when it comes to utilities and features that are iterated on in public and with great frequency. PowerToys occasionally ships with bugs or crashes that are completely acceptable and manageable to the audience of power users (and are usually fixed very quickly), but that could be much more of a problem if shipped to 1 billion users (and the steps you’d need to take to test against edge cases would slow down development, and the development speed is one of the best parts of PowerToys).
You can install it through the Microsoft Store, WinGet, Choclatey, Scoop or directly from GitHub. It would be nice if there was maybe a pointer to it inside the OS to alert some users of its existence, but the premise was similar to the OG PowerToys, which were downloadable off of the Microsoft website.
As I said in the linked comment, stuff from PowerToys does get upstreamed into the Windows shell, sometimes with modifications or refinements, but some of the utilities are things that wouldn’t necessarily make sense to be included by default.
Its a little more complicated. While its true that there was a Powertoys apllication for win95 the current one is not related to that. It's more like a spiritual successor with not direct heritage.
Windows ships many open source components these days be it first party (Calculator, Windows Terminal, WLSG) or third party (wholesale like OpenSSH or just libraries used in components).
The OSS stuff doesn’t really have anything to do with it.
The genesis of PowerToys was to provide a way to create utilities for power users that could be quickly iterated in public. When it’s part of the core OS, that makes updates/iteration harder (hence, why Windows Terminal, WSL2 beta, calculator, Notepad and some other components have moved to getting updates in the Microsoft Store separate from the main OS. So you can run an older IT mandated version of Windows but still ostensibly have a newer version of a certain component), and with stuff like PowerToys, the intended audience is different than the standard OS user, who may not be comfortable with things that can change more frequently.
That said, the feedback from PowerToys and some of those components has been upstreamed back into core Windows.
The improved window management stuff in Windows 11 is a less-advanced version of Fancy Zones (FZ has more features and options), and the same is true for the universal mute button in Windows 11, that started out as a PowerToys feature.
(Disclosure: former Microsoft employee (currently at GitHub) who knows the PowerToys team well)
Features that take advantage of multiple desktops are nonexistent. I don't think a tool to assign applications to specific desktops exists even outside the built-in stuff. And setting 1-2 apps as full-screen desktop is something I really liked about macOS that's not available. Before Windows 11, desktops didn't even have unique wallpapers.
"Assign" as in open an application on a specific desktop. Windows 11 kind of got that (automatically, unfortunately no manual control) for multiple monitors, but macOS has it for virtual desktops too. It'd be even better if it supported something more explicit like i3 layout loading, but it can probably be combined with fancyzones at that point to get that working reasonably well.
macOS also has a way to treat an application (or two, with a split view) as a virtual desktop, where the shell disappears and wouldn't allow you to open additional windows on that desktop. I particularly want this seperation because I put VMs on different desktops, but because the shell is there I inevitably have to drag over some windows that opened on that desktop over after a few hours of mindless use.
Out of the box windows management for MacOS is much worse than Windows, so not sure I follow? Power Toys does make Windows 10x better though... and they really should make it the default once it's fully stable.
I used to prefer MacOS for development, but Windows has far surpassed it in recent years, between native linux experience in WSL and better QOL tooling via Power Toys. The removal of vertical taskbar has been pretty annoying though... pretty awful on a 49" monitor. All that's left now is to get some 5nm chips in Windows machines
You get "native" linux on Windows with WSL. It's a linux container, but with nice integrations out of the box re: networking etc.
I'm not against running linux alone per se, but to me being able to run both Windows (with better app support, polish), and Linux at the same time is kind of the best of both worlds. Windows feels nicer as a daily driver, and can do all dev work directly in a linux environment
I am a big fan of WSL and used it extensively for a while across multiple development environments. Also like using Windows a lot and feel more productive on it than Unix based systems.
However, I started to run into a lot of issues with the file systems being a bit too commingled though, especially when using things like VSCode’s WSL integrations where you’re regularly reading/writing to the Linux file system from Windows (or vice versa).
I guess I mention this to say that I ended up putting Ubuntu on a Hyper V VM and it was a huge improvement. If you enjoy WSL, but need something a bit less integrated, I highly recommend it. Using VSCode’s remote container/host extensions work just as well (if not better for things like Docker).
Hmm was this for WSL v1? The previous implementation had pretty bad filesystem performance, but I haven't had any issues with WSL2. I host an app where I write gigs of data to disk every day without any perf issues.
But WSL1 would've been super slow for the same use case
No, but there is probably some law of the universe that states if there is a thread about Windows, a neckbeard must say that some feature of Windows is the worst thing ever.
I've actually never heard anyone mention Windows windows manager because the only people in the world who care don't use Windows.
How do you figure? As someone who recently switched to Mac I found that the out of the box windows management on Windows was far superior to MacOS. I needed to install a whole bunch of third part tools to make MacOS usable.
I agree that window management is poor in vanilla macOS. But fixing this just involves choosing a single tool, e.g. Moom, Magnet, etc.
Out of curiosity, what other tools do you use?
I do find this a bit annoying, but on the other hand, it gives me some flexibility to choose the style of window management I prefer through choice of utility.
The real question is why has Apple not implemented snapping behavior after ~10 years of it being in windows? But yeah, you can achieve something similar with tooling for sure.
To be more precise, it took installing a whole bunch of tools until I found a combination that worked for me. Eventually I managed to narrow it down to two, three if you count a workable file manager. One that did windows layout and one that 'fixed' Command-Tab.
I just want tmux splits at the operating system UI framework level that works across all operating systems without any hassle. Basically i3wm for Linux, Mac, and Windows, with the same keyboard shortcuts.
Fancy Zones makes my day-to-day so much more convenient. I wish there was an equivalent in Linux that worked as well - I’ve tried a few gnome plugins but always been disappointed.
KDE has Windows-style snap-to-halves or quarters by default. If you’re happy with those basic zones, it definitely works well. I don’t know if there’s a way to configure more complex zones.
Ultimately I went with 'Ultrawide Windows' [1], mostly because I like it better than the defaults and at the same time it is still simple to use. The Github page gives an impression of its capabilities and lists the hotkeys, but it is also available via the KDE integrated tools [2]. What I am still missing is a tool to simply define and use custom layouts.
I'm a huge fan of Khronkite myself, it's a quite competent tiling script that still plays nice with floating windows and all the standard KWin behaviors.
"bismuth" is an updated fork of Khronkite, which last I checked, was abandoned. (Just checked, and it has had some recent commits, though seemingly just compatibility updates so far).
Probably not exactly what you're looking for but i3 could be worth checking out. It's a tiling window manager with a powerful customization/scripting interface and it has a feature to save and restore window layouts. There's also Sway which is similar but based on Wayland though it does not have the save/restore feature.
Granted they might not be as easy to set up as installing PowerToys on Windows if you have specific expectations. (But it's not rocket science either.)
Not at all. It's a tiling window manager with workspaces, for all your applications. Terminals, web browser, audio settings, etc.
Personally I run 10 workspaces, named, e.g. 1:Firefox work, 2:vim, 3:tmux+vim, 4:terminals, etc. I even have a workspace designated to "wasting time", tiled reddit, hn, youtube, etc.
Each workspace always have the same apps, tiled in the same way, so I always know where to find what. It's very efficient.
I'm aware of i3 and I think I've tested it out in the past but had some silly nit to pick about it. Thanks for the reminder - I'll give it another try!
Hopefully Microsoft sees the writing on the wall and includes these in an update, instead of being stubborn and pretending that they have had a reason to exclude them all this time.
Do you really think that enterprise and large business (the meat and potatoes of MS money) is going to switch to Mac because it's missing some utility that 99% of users don't need?
I don't know what fuckin planet you people live on. Microsoft is a business oriented ecosystem. The fact that you can play call of duty on it is a bonus.
Have you tried looking it up? There literally is a built-in screen record functionality.[1]
I swear, half of negative comments here about Windows are FUD from users who either never used it longer than 5 minutes and don't bother looking stuff up.
At least windows explorer has some great extension utilities like File Menu Tools; a tool that can be configured to cover pretty much every file explorer extension usecase you can imagine.
OSX and XDG (Gnome etc...) based systems have nothing close last time I checked.
In OS X, Automator lets you add Finder context menu options that can, among other things, trigger AppleScript actions that can, in turn, run arbitrary (command-line and GUI) programs. These actions can optionally be configured to only appear for certain file types.
Recent Finder versions relegate custom actions to a "Quick Actions" submenu by default, but you can restore an action to top-level by removing the "NSIconName" entry from the action's Info.plist in ~/Library/Services.
Your analytical skills could use some work - that feature has been in Finder for over half a decade. It's also vastly more powerful as it can interface with AppleScript. I think they've added Shortcuts to the latest macOS release which introduces infinitely more possibilities, though admittedly I'm quite unfamiliar with this
Trollish usernames aren't allowed here, because they effectively troll every thread they post to. I've therefore banned this account. If you want to pick a different username, we can unban you.
On a different note, can you please omit swipes and putdowns (like "Your analytical skills could use some work") from your HN posts? That sort of thing degrades discussion and evokes worse from others, so we're trying to avoid it here. Your comment would be just fine without that leading bit.
This reminds me of one of my favorite features from the Mac: Quick Look — press space to instantly bring up a big contextual preview window of the selected document in the Finder.
Yes, there are plugins for the preview pane and some are built-in. That’s very nice, but I prefer having the ability to hit space to preview because of 15 years of muscle memory doing that with macOS.
Quick look is more than just a preview, it's really a read-only view of the document. You can read entire documents and PDFs, view HTML files rendered, pan through CSVs, etc
Yes! Love this for Windows, there are plugins for it too, similar to the plugins for macOS. Like you, QuickLook is one of my favorite and most-used macOS features and I cannot be on a system without it.
Between this project and PowerToys, the Windows experience is a lot more enjoyable.
PowerToys Run especially (essentially Alfred or QuickSilver for Windows), is much faster and better than standard Win-S searches.
I use this all the time. While the preview window is open, you can even use keyboard arrows to move to other files (or just select them with mouse) and the preview gets updated.
I have remembet that when the preview window is active, if you double click the document it will open in relavent app. It seems to gone at some point. Any idea?
That's if you're using Finder's embedded preview on Columns mode. If you're using Spacebar to preview, there will be a button on the top right corner to open in the relevant app.
It's easily forgotten now, but in the 95 and 98 eras Microsoft actually bundled a utility called Quick View [1] that added a quick preview to the context menu. It got lost in the XP transition and I have to wonder if they thought that the changes that came along with the IE-ified version of explorer.exe (image thumbnails, document previews in the sidebar) replicated enough of the functionality that it wasn't necessary anymore (they didn't).
I'd use PowerToys Color Picker more, but it lacks contrast ratios/accessibility information, which is where it would be most useful to me. It was suggested on their GitHub but didn't gain much traction:
I use FancyZones as well but I get annoyed that it doesn't seem to preserve custom layouts between reboots. I have to switch to my layouts manually after every reboot. Have you experienced it too? I am curious about whether it is something on my end or not.
FancyZones seems to forget currently selected layout every time it is updated and every time a new Windows developer preview is installed. Other than that, it should be exactly as you left it.
I found that IT at work wouldn't let me install powertoys because they didn't like the Awake feature. Please bundle these in of allow us to install them one by one.
There's environments where you get in trouble for unauthorized USB devices. Of course, you can just have them emulate an allowed VID/PID pair and get away with it, but it will lead to a rules clarification.
You don't have to plug in the mouse jiggler, it can be a separate device that hooks onto the mouse itself. The OS on the computer would never know about it since it's separate from the computer.
Considering how much energy my work laptop burns on a daily basis because of the four(!) different security products, I am curious how Awake is where they draw the line.
Any video will do. I hear having an open powerpoint presentation will also keep a device awake. Presumably Microsoft office is a mandatory install on such dystopian environments.
At my previous job, they locked down music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora because the company wanted to save bandwidth at the office.
But they didn't lock out YouTube, because sometimes YouTube had a business purpose. So people just switched to YouTube for listening to music, which used even more bandwidth. In protest of the ridiculousness of the no-music-streaming policy, some people even forced their YouTube to stream in 4K even when they had a 1080p monitor.
The blocking of music streaming was lifted within a couple months.
I use PowerToys just for the easy key remapping, which I wish was a built-in feature in more keyboards. Works very nicely as a simple alternative to AutoHotKey. My RSI has gotten a lot better by just remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl.
If any PowerToys feature deserves to be added to Windows, it's gotta be the Keyboard Manager.
Key shortcut remapping should absolutely be a base feature of every single OS for accessibility reasons.
Back when I used to use Adobe Fireworks there was a shortcut for flattening the current selection, I believe it was cmd+ctrl+shift+Z and I'm pressing this hundreds of times a week and eventually it gave me RSI.
After this happened I remapped it to cmd+F, luckily the app had the ability to do that but honestly I consider it important enough that the OS should provide it. I know a lot of windows users point to AutoHotKey but it's a horrible janky feeling hack and requires you to write actual scripts.
In macOS at least you can remap any key as well as keyboard shortcut (both globally and per-app) from the built in OS keyboard preferences. The only thing it requires is that the thing you want to change has a "menu item" (so a named thing in the top menu bar in any of the submenus). Hotkey mapping works by simply mapping to any of the texts in those (sub) menus, however deep you want to go. The great thing about it is the developer of the app doesn't need to do anything to allows that, and it essentially only gets broken if an app goes out of its way to be as non-native as possible (i.e. if it doesn't even use the standard libraries that ship with the OS).
It’s a great feature. It doesn’t always work 100% stable though. Would love to see it put further into the OS somehow. Macos key / modifier remaps are much more stable than powertoys’.
I tend to remap caps to ctrl, for instance. Sometimes this fails, meaning that suddenly, the keyboard is stuck in caps lock mode and can’t be returned to «lower caps mode». I don’t know if autohotkey can intercept caps lock?
It still doesn’t support app-specific key remappings though (as opposed to app-specific keyboard shortcuts). This issue has been open since 2020, I’m not sure what they are waiting for: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6756
This is one thing I love about Wooting keyboards. The Wootility [0] lets you drag and drop keys around your layout to remap them, and save the mappings to the keyboard itself, so the keys will stay mapped even if you move it between systems.
The Windows PowerToys brand name has been around for a long time! I still remember downloading them from the Microsoft website for Windows XP to add features to Windows and customize Explorer's behavior.
I remember when PowerToy was the only to get focus-follow-mouse, before you could do that in the registry. This was magic! It made Windows half usable.
These days, when IT spends so much effort to make working difficult, and castrate Windows to the the point it is unusable, I work on Mac if my customer won't allow Linux, and that has to be one of the most frustrating thing on macOS, you have to click to bring anything in focus. I swear I spend 30% of my time clicking on things just so I can type in them!
Many of these things come out of the box on a Linux distro : Always on top, color picker, File explorer add-ons, keyboard manager, "mouse utilities" and "the Powertoys run" (a poor imitation of krunner could do)
Poor is exactly what it is. The converter is so broken, that a space in the wrong place will cause it to not work. IIRC something like 5m to ft works but not 5 m to ft
Lightning 5.1.0 with JS enabled and no other 'nasties' in place (no browser spoofing etc.) on Android 7.
Its fork SmartCookieWeb evokes the same reaction. There are 5 different browsers on this phone including two of those suggested, (Firefox and Chrome) but I wouldn't even bother trying them on this site on principle.
These are great, but with some of them I cannot help but wonder why MSFT would choose not to include them in the OS by default. They seem fairly unobtrusive and like they wouldn't add too much complexity to the product in return for what you get in terms of better usability and/or additional functionality.
Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software product, especially if it's an OS — but windows contains two different consoles, about three versions of the system preferences management, ..., it just doesn't seem like MSFT to be that picky about what they'll put into their product.
In a small amount of fairness, Windows only comes with one console. On Windows 10, you have to install Windows Terminal separately, and on Windows 11, Windows Terminal is the only one.
Windows 10 comes with cmd.exe and power shell, both include their own terminal emulators. Windows 11 comes with both and with windows terminal on top of it.
No, that's not right. conhost.exe is the old terminal emulator and Windows Terminal is the new one. cmd.exe and powershell are analogous to bash/zsh/etc. and can run inside either conhost.exe or Windows Terminal.
Conhost is not really a terminal emulator, except in the sense that it’s a square box to type into. It is not an emulator. Design, Architecture, implementation all completely different and gimped.
Yes good point. One of the things that annoys me most about HNers is that they think Unix is the one true OS paradigm and measure all other designs by how similar they are. And here I am doing it myself.
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name.
Thy programs run, thy syscalls done,
in kernel as it is in user!
Give us this day our daily cycles,
And forgive us our GOTO's
As we forgive them that also use BASIC.
Lead us not into FORTRAN,
But deliver us from COBOL.
For thine is the for loop, the while and the switch
For ever and ever,
Amen.
cmd.exe and powershell do not include "terminal emulators". Pre-Windows Terminal, they (and every other console app) use conhost.exe, that comes with the system. Windows Terminal comes with openconsole.exe, that any app can use instead. In Windows 11, it can be set up as the default one.
Support costs. They don't help enough people to justify the problems that would pop up. The people who download Power Toys can probably take care of themselves.
given the approx. millions of configurations they already support, adding more is always a cost-benefit analysis.
personally if I was a developer of this I wouldn't want it anywhere near the gold release... it'd take all the fun away and you'd have to give up development to some team you haven't heard about in the next cost optimization cycle (Real Soon Now(TM))
Yup, everything you add is something that people will call about, guaranteed. And these are more complex than most things. You imagine if everyone could remap their keys? You make it free and easy to download and do Github "support".
When you have a product that is marketed towards the masses, support costs can be astronomical. A not-too-small number of calls won't even be for your product.
My uncle works tech support for a major ISP. He gets at least a couple calls a day from people thinking they need to call him because their Windows PC won't turn on or some other non-Internet related issue.
And then there's the sheer number of trivial calls. Do you know how many people call Amazon because they forgot their password, rather than just using the password reset function? Or how many people call their bank to find their balance rather than checking the website? And of course, these people demand to talk to a human.
PowerToys broke Zoom for me once with the new mute meeting button. I thought it was my headset being finicky. After some swapping in and out devices, googling and looking at Github issues, I had to uninstall and remove an emulated camera in the hardware manager to resolve it. I haven't reinstalled, it ain't perfect.
FancyZones are quite more powerful, eg. you can hold shift while dragging a window to show your layound and snap that window to the layout. With 11 it's pretty much exclusively limited to "either drag a window against the side of the screen for zone hints, or hover the maximize button".
PowerToys is able to grow, experiment and evolve much more quickly as a standalone application because shipping something inside Windows is hard. The OS has a very long support and compatibility guarantee that makes it extremely difficult to iterate and ship features quickly. The .NET team is pretty open about how being coupled to Windows for a long time held .NET back.
Also, my understanding is that PowerToys is sort of an incubator; successful experiments may eventually make it into Windows itself.
I got a headset that mutes when I move the mic up and unmutes when I move it back down: jabra evolve2 65, comes in mono and stereo. If you want an over-ear option they have evolve2 85 but that's like $500
I highly recommend the new PowerToys. It's like the old one you remember from the 2000/XP days. This article covers my thoughts pretty well; always weird to see your own thoughts echoed back to you.
FYI, if you shift-right-click files in explorer there is a 'copy as path' option (why this is hidden by default is mysterious to me). Not nearly as useful as that utility, but good to have if you can't install extensions!
Since I so rarely see a Windows thread, perhaps folks wont mind me asking:
What utilities or code would you leverage if you had a use case to run a program on a Windows machine once a day and look for any CSV/XLS/XLSX files and then copy those to another server? (With full knowledge of the owner of said computer, they are just lacking in proficiency to do anything even as simple as connect Box Sync)
Thanks! Any idea if it can be customized ahead of install? Trying to walk these users through setting it up themselves would be unlikely to succeed. They can install a program, but likely not succeed in customizing what the program does.
I've used robocopy + task scheduler before actually for this use case but as far as I could tell robocopy doesn't have a way to search across directories to find files but rather just gets set up on a particular directory.
Maybe something in Powershell to find the files and then copy them into a folder which is then set up with Robocopy?
Note, I have no access to the computer itself and the users are incapable of doing much beyond downloading a .exe file and installing a program, so whatever is done has to be as close to simple as that for them.
The Windows Task Scheduler is probably the way to go. You can create tasks that run on a variety of schedules or events. They can run a script that does what you need.
There is a PowerShell module for managing scheduled tasks. It should be possible to write a script that will create the appropriate scheduled tasks on behalf of the non-proficient user. They just need to run the PowerShell script once to get things going.
Thanks, but is there a way to do that without having access to the computer or having to try to walk the user through setting up a task in task scheduler? The users in this use case can do something as simple as download and install a .exe program, but there is no way they would manage setting something up in Task Scheduler.
I've used Task Scheduler via remote desktop (which itself was a pain to get them able to set up) to set things up for them before but that is not scalable.
Yes that is what the PowerShell module is for. You can script things like ‘New-ScheduledTask’ and give it the appropriate parameters. The only thing the user would need to do is run the script. That could create the scheduled tasks and drop the “real” scripts where the scheduled tasks can find them.
It can be helpful to send along a tuple of {PowerShell, cmd} where cmd just forwards arguments to PowerShell. That way you can run “PowerShell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass myscript.ps1 %*” and avoid the pain of changing the system-wide security policy for PowerShell scripts. (Unsigned PowerShell scripts are blocked by default).
i'm having trouble coming up with ethical reasons to want .csv and .xlsx files from users that aren't "proficient at configuring software". A good backup solution will use deltas and do exactly this, and be preconfigured or configured-at-runtime.
If you really must, you can always write the program yourself, it sounds very easy. Deploy it with an installer that copies a link into Startup, the whole bit.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadIt can be turned off.
So it should be back to normal!
The clue is in the name "Power" -- it's additional functionality for power users. Since Windows generally caters for the lowest common denominator, features like this would be deemed too complicated (sometimes even dangerous) for some folk. So it is an optional addon for power users.
It's just like how WSL, PowerShell, etc aren't installed by default either.
It'd be more useful if it worked with any messaging app that was running on my phone though!
* PowerToys Awake - Amphetamine
* PowerToys FancyZones - Moom
* PowerToys Run - Alfred
* EarTrumpet - Rogue Amoeba SoundSource
* Windows Terminal - iTerm
* QuickLook - Mac Native Functionality
* Nothing for Windows - HazeOver
* Windows Native Functionality - Bartender
* Snipping Tool - Clean Shot X
* Windows Terminal - iTerm
* Snipping Tool - Clean Shot X
These are not fair comparisons. The Mac tools you list here are much more powerful than the Windows counterparts, and there are good enough built-in alternatives (Spotlight, Terminal and the default screenshot tool).
* PowerToys FancyZones - Moom
This isn't fair either. FancyZones is much more powerful; Rectangle is a better comparison.
(There's also the possibility that there are amazing things I wouldn't use, of course. I have discovered that while I like keyboard shortcuts and Moom's hover dropdown for window resizing/movement, I find "drag a window to the screen edge to resize it" to be a maddening anti-feature.)
By keeping little toys like this outside of the main Windows feature set, they stay out of the 500 review and design steps, where any of 5000 people can kill the feature.
There’s a lot of politics too. Something like a unmute button may be “owned” by the liaison to the Teams program management, who in turn want universal unmute to be an Azure service that is incorporated into “Azure Live Office Solutions for Windows (Govcloud) for Business E7”.
Installing of applications is done by dragging them into some place, and then there is no feedback about what is happening. And so on and on.
Presumably you’ve been a windows user long enough, or at least exposed to Windows enough times to have figured out you can double click a title bar in that operating system and maximize a window, so it’s probably not too far of a stretch to guess you would have figured it out in macOS by simply trying to do the same thing
Agreeably macOS is highly opinionated when it comes to “discovering” some of the hidden interaction features, but come on. You really wouldn’t have had any other way to figure how to embiggen a window without without having to come to HN and read the above comment?
That feels like an extreme example for the sake of being oppositional
The only way to replicate the Windows behaviour of truly maximising is to use third-party tools like Rectangle.
Vendors should include only the bare essentials, then let users who want more add their own extras.
Imagine an OS similar to the original Macintosh, or maybe early versions of iOS, but with add-ons that can add features to the global UI. New users have a basic system with easily-understood behaviors, and experienced users can enable the features they need.
In an alternate universe where I believed it was possible to compete with the major vendors, this is the platform I would build...
iPhones have a feature where you can create PDFs page by page, using the camera as a scanner. After you snap the photo it offers you a crop and transform tool, and does a little image recognition to assist you and make the edges of the crop tool snap to the page within the photo.
I've found that feature immensely useful in a professional context and (it was a company device) when I gave the phone back I seriously considered switching away from Android for my personal phone.
Little things like that, baked into the OS, make for a really awesome UX.
The files app should be exclusively for listing/moving/copying files. Files themselves should be created by and opened with different apps.
This isn't to say apps shouldn't be able to talk to the files app. On macOS, for example, apps can install QuickLook plugins.
It's been a few years since I had that phone so the details are a bit fuzzy but I seem to recall it was very discoverable from the email attachment interface, at the very least.
Problem with a separate app is that it's a separate codebase and thus easier for it to fall to neglect.
That's great if I'm sending an email, but what if I want to upload the documents to a website, or send them via iMessage, or Airdrop them to another Apple device, or print out the scan to effectively make a second paper copy? Do you add the icon to each of these interfaces, taking up screen real estate and adding mental load? (One new icon is never a problem, but do it 30 times and you'll be in a bad spot.)
IMO, Apple's strategy significantly railroads users, while making interfaces ever-more complicated.
> Problem with a separate app is that it's a separate codebase and thus easier for it to fall to neglect.
Yeah, bundling everything into iTunes worked really well for Apple, didn't it? :D
I really don't think we should be making UI decisions based on this.
I'm not really an "Apple Guy" so it's not clear to me what you are referring to.
When Apple finally killed the Mac version of iTunes on stage at WWDC, they basically admitted that they'd tried to cram in too much functionality, by joking that they were considering a Calendar and Web Browser.
This used to be appealing to me, back when the open-source model seemed to be viable even on macOS and Windows. Now any look at the app store will show you apps performing the most basic, should-be (and often is!) bundled, functionality that cost $5 apiece. No slight against developers, who have a right to make a living, but if I just dropped thousands of dollars on a computer and then had to pay $5 for each small convenience feature I wanted, it would definitely be a significant downgrade in experience. I don't live in the Windows ecosystem any more, but the macOS freeware ecosystem has significantly degraded (and it's not just a matter of “I have to use something old”—due to architecture changes, most of the old stuff doesn't work any more, and, understandably, even if the original maintainer is still keeping it up, they now often charge for the product).
But, that's why I think it's great that PowerToys is made by Microsoft. Just because a feature isn't included in the base OS doesn't mean the same company can't create it.
First off, macOS is missing its own features such as three-finger tap to middle click and window snapping, and what you get on Linux is going to vary based on your DE.
Second, building something in adds bloat for people who don't use it and can kill off choices of third-party options that might do the feature (subjectively) better (I still see people mad that Apple killed Sherlock by building their own version of it in)
I like the idea of something pluggable, but also with sane and disableable default features that 98% of users will be totally fine with.
Without it, Windows would be a nightmare to use on a 45" display.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
Why aren't these just bundled by default??
0: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window...
Having said that, I don't know how window snapping being on by default isn't incredibly frustrating for someone who is simply trying to precisely position a window near a corner only to have it snap in a way they didn't want it to.
You can install it through the Microsoft Store, WinGet, Choclatey, Scoop or directly from GitHub. It would be nice if there was maybe a pointer to it inside the OS to alert some users of its existence, but the premise was similar to the OG PowerToys, which were downloadable off of the Microsoft website.
As I said in the linked comment, stuff from PowerToys does get upstreamed into the Windows shell, sometimes with modifications or refinements, but some of the utilities are things that wouldn’t necessarily make sense to be included by default.
I had no idea it was there for that long!
Honestly, from their perspective it probably makes sense to keep it separate from the main OS if they like keeping it open source.
The first release of the current applicaiton was 2019. The wiki article is quite detailed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerToys
The genesis of PowerToys was to provide a way to create utilities for power users that could be quickly iterated in public. When it’s part of the core OS, that makes updates/iteration harder (hence, why Windows Terminal, WSL2 beta, calculator, Notepad and some other components have moved to getting updates in the Microsoft Store separate from the main OS. So you can run an older IT mandated version of Windows but still ostensibly have a newer version of a certain component), and with stuff like PowerToys, the intended audience is different than the standard OS user, who may not be comfortable with things that can change more frequently.
That said, the feedback from PowerToys and some of those components has been upstreamed back into core Windows.
The improved window management stuff in Windows 11 is a less-advanced version of Fancy Zones (FZ has more features and options), and the same is true for the universal mute button in Windows 11, that started out as a PowerToys feature.
(Disclosure: former Microsoft employee (currently at GitHub) who knows the PowerToys team well)
[1]http://misweb.cbi.msstate.edu/~rpearson/tips/tweakui.html
For me, Windows 11 has one of the best window management experiences out of the box, far ahead of MacOS and in line Linux.
The ease of resizing, snapping and tiling windows out of the box is really well implemented in Windows 11 so I really don't get your claim.
macOS also has a way to treat an application (or two, with a split view) as a virtual desktop, where the shell disappears and wouldn't allow you to open additional windows on that desktop. I particularly want this seperation because I put VMs on different desktops, but because the shell is there I inevitably have to drag over some windows that opened on that desktop over after a few hours of mindless use.
While I like my awesome more on a laptop, every is can be configured one way or the other to feel similar across OSes.
Tx :D
I use BetterTouchTool, but there are many tools that accomplish the same thing as far as window snapping is concerned.
Here is an article that goes over many options: https://techwiser.com/snap-windows-on-macos
I used to prefer MacOS for development, but Windows has far surpassed it in recent years, between native linux experience in WSL and better QOL tooling via Power Toys. The removal of vertical taskbar has been pretty annoying though... pretty awful on a 49" monitor. All that's left now is to get some 5nm chips in Windows machines
I'm not against running linux alone per se, but to me being able to run both Windows (with better app support, polish), and Linux at the same time is kind of the best of both worlds. Windows feels nicer as a daily driver, and can do all dev work directly in a linux environment
However, I started to run into a lot of issues with the file systems being a bit too commingled though, especially when using things like VSCode’s WSL integrations where you’re regularly reading/writing to the Linux file system from Windows (or vice versa).
I guess I mention this to say that I ended up putting Ubuntu on a Hyper V VM and it was a huge improvement. If you enjoy WSL, but need something a bit less integrated, I highly recommend it. Using VSCode’s remote container/host extensions work just as well (if not better for things like Docker).
But WSL1 would've been super slow for the same use case
I've actually never heard anyone mention Windows windows manager because the only people in the world who care don't use Windows.
Out of curiosity, what other tools do you use?
I do find this a bit annoying, but on the other hand, it gives me some flexibility to choose the style of window management I prefer through choice of utility.
Ultimately I went with 'Ultrawide Windows' [1], mostly because I like it better than the defaults and at the same time it is still simple to use. The Github page gives an impression of its capabilities and lists the hotkeys, but it is also available via the KDE integrated tools [2]. What I am still missing is a tool to simply define and use custom layouts.
[1] https://github.com/lucmos/UltrawideWindows/
[2] https://store.kde.org/p/1276605/
There are plugins (Window Management → KWin Scripts) that add options, I see Tiling, FlexGrid, KWin QuickTile, and several more.
Win+shift plus arrow moves window to each monitor
Three finger swipe on track pad give you open windows as displayed on each desktop, with ability to drag window to whatever desktop.
I keep three desktops, all with a different wallpaper so I know which desktop for what.
All work windows on D1 - research - d2 - and primary app I’m using if needs full screen on d3.
The only problem is forgetting to switch desktop when you switch mental modes…. Like opening a bunch of HN links in your app desktop…
So just redraft them from whatever to wherever.
I’ll check out fancy…
—-
What I also like, is I have two external USB monitors for my laptop..
And I have a diff display layout depending on which of the additional screens I have plugged in. It remembers the location of each.
So when I have just one screen plugged in, the second is to the right.
When both are connnected: it knows that one is right and one is up above.
Granted they might not be as easy to set up as installing PowerToys on Windows if you have specific expectations. (But it's not rocket science either.)
https://i3wm.org/
As GP said, by default, it's automatic, so there are no pre-defined "zones". But it can be scripted to do quite a lot of things.
Personally I run 10 workspaces, named, e.g. 1:Firefox work, 2:vim, 3:tmux+vim, 4:terminals, etc. I even have a workspace designated to "wasting time", tiled reddit, hn, youtube, etc.
Each workspace always have the same apps, tiled in the same way, so I always know where to find what. It's very efficient.
Hopefully Microsoft sees the writing on the wall and includes these in an update, instead of being stubborn and pretending that they have had a reason to exclude them all this time.
I don't know what fuckin planet you people live on. Microsoft is a business oriented ecosystem. The fact that you can play call of duty on it is a bonus.
Do they have to pay attention to it? No. Will it help improve their OS as a daily driver for non enterprise users? Sure.
at least gifs pls
I swear, half of negative comments here about Windows are FUD from users who either never used it longer than 5 minutes and don't bother looking stuff up.
[1] https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-video-screen-captu...
Video recording isn't gaming feature, it's the same kind of app as paint, notepad or calculator are.
Oddly enough, PowerPoint includes a screen recording tool that is fairly robust.
OSX and XDG (Gnome etc...) based systems have nothing close last time I checked.
Recent Finder versions relegate custom actions to a "Quick Actions" submenu by default, but you can restore an action to top-level by removing the "NSIconName" entry from the action's Info.plist in ~/Library/Services.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
(EDIT: I was "posting too fast". In the meantime, I think that jasomills has pointed this out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31305652).)
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
On a different note, can you please omit swipes and putdowns (like "Your analytical skills could use some work") from your HN posts? That sort of thing degrades discussion and evokes worse from others, so we're trying to avoid it here. Your comment would be just fine without that leading bit.
You can bring it to Windows with this useful open source tool: https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook
Between this project and PowerToys, the Windows experience is a lot more enjoyable.
PowerToys Run especially (essentially Alfred or QuickSilver for Windows), is much faster and better than standard Win-S searches.
https://keypirinha.com/
- Command-Delete to delete the current file
- Return, type a new name, and return, to rename the current file
In both cases the view will properly update.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_View
I'd use PowerToys Color Picker more, but it lacks contrast ratios/accessibility information, which is where it would be most useful to me. It was suggested on their GitHub but didn't gain much traction:
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/9357
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/14454
9 times out of 10, I am getting color information to run these exact checks, so it would just save an extra step.
But Explorer is something I stopped using more than a decade ago when I encountered TotalCommander - that I cannot do without!!!
The regex-supporting live-preview batch-filenaming utility alone is awesome.
I work so much faster (with the keyboard) than will ever possible in Explorer!
I could write for hours about the greatness of TCM, but as that’s a little off topic here I won’t :-)
Cross-platform, feature packed, constantly updated, Lua-scriptable, supports TC plugins, written in Free Pascal.
https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io
There's an enhanced TC called TC UP with additional utilities:
https://www.tcup.pl/index.php/en/
(disclosure: former Microsoft employee (now at GitHub) who knows the PowerToys team)
I do it when working at home with a digispark that simulates a mouse that moves a tiny bit once in a while.
You could even place the mouse on a moving surface or something.
I think in the office locking a PC is very important but in a WFH situation much less so. Especially in my case where I live alone.
I've had environments where the system was pretty locked down, but had access to VBScript: https://gist.github.com/valdergallo/0e05d9e0c90b7be77458
> dystopian environments
Some places block streaming purely because it clogs the VPNs if they route everything through the in house infra
Depends on how locked down the security setup is. The more sensitive the info the worse it is
But they didn't lock out YouTube, because sometimes YouTube had a business purpose. So people just switched to YouTube for listening to music, which used even more bandwidth. In protest of the ridiculousness of the no-music-streaming policy, some people even forced their YouTube to stream in 4K even when they had a 1080p monitor.
The blocking of music streaming was lifted within a couple months.
If any PowerToys feature deserves to be added to Windows, it's gotta be the Keyboard Manager.
Back when I used to use Adobe Fireworks there was a shortcut for flattening the current selection, I believe it was cmd+ctrl+shift+Z and I'm pressing this hundreds of times a week and eventually it gave me RSI.
After this happened I remapped it to cmd+F, luckily the app had the ability to do that but honestly I consider it important enough that the OS should provide it. I know a lot of windows users point to AutoHotKey but it's a horrible janky feeling hack and requires you to write actual scripts.
And it should be a global panel for all installed apps..
With a tab for each app-map, and the ability to export/import a settings file.
Just frustrates me other OSes don’t match this bar that I consider the bare minimum.
https://www.ghacks.net/2010/06/06/the-ultimate-guide-to-keyb...
In the meantime I’ll stick with AutoHotkey.
[0] https://next.wooting.io/wootility
These days, when IT spends so much effort to make working difficult, and castrate Windows to the the point it is unusable, I work on Mac if my customer won't allow Linux, and that has to be one of the most frustrating thing on macOS, you have to click to bring anything in focus. I swear I spend 30% of my time clicking on things just so I can type in them!
Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20895031 - Sept 2019 (163 comments)
PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20890828 - Sept 2019 (126 comments)
PowerToys – Windows system utilities to maximize productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19845287 - May 2019 (29 comments)
Its fork SmartCookieWeb evokes the same reaction. There are 5 different browsers on this phone including two of those suggested, (Firefox and Chrome) but I wouldn't even bother trying them on this site on principle.
Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software product, especially if it's an OS — but windows contains two different consoles, about three versions of the system preferences management, ..., it just doesn't seem like MSFT to be that picky about what they'll put into their product.
if they can't do it, i know lot of people who would do it for the same salary they are getting over there at MSFT
lazy culture, how long it took them to add tabs to explorer? hmm
personally if I was a developer of this I wouldn't want it anywhere near the gold release... it'd take all the fun away and you'd have to give up development to some team you haven't heard about in the next cost optimization cycle (Real Soon Now(TM))
My uncle works tech support for a major ISP. He gets at least a couple calls a day from people thinking they need to call him because their Windows PC won't turn on or some other non-Internet related issue.
And then there's the sheer number of trivial calls. Do you know how many people call Amazon because they forgot their password, rather than just using the password reset function? Or how many people call their bank to find their balance rather than checking the website? And of course, these people demand to talk to a human.
are they features that were planned but then abandoned?
do developers at microsoft have the autonomy to build features they personally find interesting while on the clock?
do they come from hackathon like events?
do they now all come through a dedicated team?
Also, my understanding is that PowerToys is sort of an incubator; successful experiments may eventually make it into Windows itself.
This PowerTools has something close but not exactly what I’m looking for.
I’ve gotten used to PTT in apps like Ventrilo / Discord and hate having to constantly unmute / remute in Teams.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/muting-and-unmuti...
[1]: https://github.com/SaifAqqad/AHK_MicMute
It’s not actively maintained though
Built into windows since Windows 7 iirc.
Maybe something in Powershell to find the files and then copy them into a folder which is then set up with Robocopy?
Note, I have no access to the computer itself and the users are incapable of doing much beyond downloading a .exe file and installing a program, so whatever is done has to be as close to simple as that for them.
There is a PowerShell module for managing scheduled tasks. It should be possible to write a script that will create the appropriate scheduled tasks on behalf of the non-proficient user. They just need to run the PowerShell script once to get things going.
I've used Task Scheduler via remote desktop (which itself was a pain to get them able to set up) to set things up for them before but that is not scalable.
It can be helpful to send along a tuple of {PowerShell, cmd} where cmd just forwards arguments to PowerShell. That way you can run “PowerShell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass myscript.ps1 %*” and avoid the pain of changing the system-wide security policy for PowerShell scripts. (Unsigned PowerShell scripts are blocked by default).
1. Just powershell in a loop working as a service 2. Task Scheduler 3. Rundeck 4. Pode
WinScp is awesome for linux, and you can use simple PowerShell remoting for windows.
If you really must, you can always write the program yourself, it sounds very easy. Deploy it with an installer that copies a link into Startup, the whole bit.