Found this to keep my computer awake temporarily but there's a lot more useful stuff here, and it's available on the Microsoft store.
Favorites so far:
PowerToys Awake - keep a computer awake without having to manage its power & sleep settings
File Locksmith - check which files are in use and by which processes
PowerRename - bulk file renaming
Text Extractor - copy text anywhere on screen
Every thread about windows has everyone moaning about bloat. Some tools from the Powertoys Suite are usable, but the whole thing is incredibly clunky and slow even compared to the React native infested Windows 11
I've used "DeskPins" for a while now to replicate "Always On Top". Exciting to see its now 'native' to Windows. It's not a significant program, but I'm gonna try to swap over
If only Microsoft could make it part of Windows by default instead of those lucky users who discover what PowerToys needing to submit their request to corporate IT and enduring either incredulity or dumb jokes about the naming.
Gatekeeping as "power user features" is silly, it's 2025 and many of these features have been built-in on other operating systems for a decade or more.
FancyZones is a must-have if you use an ultrawide monitor! I set mine up with two zones, where one takes up about 1/3 of the screen and the other takes up about 2/3.
I've found splitting up my ultrawide into 6x2 cells, then you can use Ctrl+Shift to select every cell your mouse enters additively. I've wanted something like this for linux for a long time but haven't found anything.
If only there were a power toy to make it so that I can drag a file onto an app on the Win11 task bar to open it with that app, then I could actually switch to Win11. Until then, Power Toys makes every day with Win10 a little bit better.
The ‘proxy’ part on MacOS (which I think was a thing way back to System 9, 8 and maybe even 7) is something I have always missed in the Windows world.
Also being able toneart a path in to an open/save dialog to get the path there is a thing I miss!
Wow. It's been a while since I used it. It's come a long way, this is excellent. At the time I chose fluent search with everything.exe file indexing and quicklook previews (all integrated), and it was really good. If powertoys can replace all that with one tool I'll be really happy. However, everything.exe will always be the only search indexer I ever use, the thing is just orders of magnitude better than anything else. So if command palette can't interface with that, it's a deal breaker.
I can't believe I've never seen this before - I was scrolling through the list of tools and almost every one of them is something I've either wished I had or went out of my way to download some software. Thanks!
One annoying thing (among others) I realized after upgrading to Windows 11 recently is the ability to position the taskbar on the right or left is gone. Microsoft and its all knowing Windows 11 team decided that having the taskbar anywhere except at the bottom doesn’t work well and removed this positioning feature that has existed for decades.
I doubt that PowerToys would add a feature for this, but it’d be cool if it happened.
They didn't remove it. The new taskbar and start menu were written for Windows 10x (a sandboxed version of windows meant for dual screen devices) when that was canceled Microsoft bolted them on top of Windows 10 added arbitrary hardware restrictions and released as Windows 11
I honestly don't get what the technical reason is. Surely no one is hardcoding pixel offsets somewhere. The rendering code likely doesn't care where it starts to render the taskbar and where the main display renders. It can obviously also be rendered without a taskbar below. The most effort is probably incorporating it into settings, but this is hopefully also not hardcoded. This all sounds like something a single employee could implement in one afternoon.
Aaahh, PowerToys - making Windows somewhat usable since 1996.
On a related note, before I'm forced to write my own, does anyone know of a Windows tool that allows keyboard based window navigation? Not the alt-tab faff, I mean like in terminal emulators and terminal multiplexers, I want to use say win-ctrl-arrows to move focus from the current window to the adjacent or overlapping visible window to the left, right etc.
Tried it and realized it was gimped compared to the Linux tools it was trying to emulate. Monopolies will always be playing catchup with basic functionalities people have done for free because they make sense.
It is a little annoying that I had to install this in order to remap the capslock key on my laptop to a control key. That's all I use from powertoys, but I guess I'm glad it is at least feasible.
Is there a single utility more powerful than some standalone alternative? Seems like none of them are very powerful despite the name (though maybe that's what the "toys" is for?)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadFavorites so far: PowerToys Awake - keep a computer awake without having to manage its power & sleep settings File Locksmith - check which files are in use and by which processes PowerRename - bulk file renaming Text Extractor - copy text anywhere on screen
Beyond this, PowerToys can take third party contributions and evolve far faster/easier than Windows official release software.
I've used "DeskPins" for a while now to replicate "Always On Top". Exciting to see its now 'native' to Windows. It's not a significant program, but I'm gonna try to swap over
(https://github.com/thewhitegrizzli/DeskPins)
Gatekeeping as "power user features" is silly, it's 2025 and many of these features have been built-in on other operating systems for a decade or more.
That said, PowerToys was the first thing I installed on the new laptop.
I found OpenHashTab to be a good tool for this in the meantime: https://github.com/namazso/OpenHashTab
I use Raycast on MacOS, a Windows version is coming: https://www.raycast.com/windows
These and Sysinternals (bought by Microsoft around 2006) were must have when I was still using Windows.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/
I doubt that PowerToys would add a feature for this, but it’d be cool if it happened.
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/410
I can't find it now, but I think it also used to crash outlook if you put mailto: links in emails.
On a related note, before I'm forced to write my own, does anyone know of a Windows tool that allows keyboard based window navigation? Not the alt-tab faff, I mean like in terminal emulators and terminal multiplexers, I want to use say win-ctrl-arrows to move focus from the current window to the adjacent or overlapping visible window to the left, right etc.
Someone must have done this already...