Bookmark This Site to Try Microsoft’s New Windows PowerToys This Summer
Remember PowerToys? These were utilities from the Windows 95 and Windows XP era that provided you with capabilities beyond what “normal” Windows users could do on their operating systems, such as opening a command prompt directly in a folder (instead of “burning a CD”). disk “in its own way. top), changing the screen resolution using the context menu with a quick right click and the good old XMouse .
Well, PowerToys is back – Microsoft is opening the source for a new set of utilities for modern versions of Windows. Although the company has come up with only two, I would definitely add PowerToys on GitHub in bookmarks . This is because the company plans to release these utilities this summer – I want to play with them as soon as they become available – and also because Microsoft has a bunch of other ideas on its list to build.
The two PowerToys Microsoft releases first are the Maximize to New Desktop widget and Windows Keyboard Shortcuts Guide. Here’s a quick overview of what they do:
Expand to a new desktop
Microsoft’s first utility converts the standard Windows maximize button — the rectangle in the upper-right corner of a standard window — into a button that now has a special hover effect. Hover your mouse over it, click the new button that appears, and you’ll expand whatever window you’re looking at to a brand new virtual desktop.
If you’ve never played with virtual desktops, this is a good way to keep yourself organized, especially in a single monitor setup. To try them out, open the Windows task window by clicking the two overlapping rectangle button on the taskbar (or by pressing the Windows key + Tab) and look for the New Desktop option in the upper left corner of the screen. screen.
Creating a second desktop doesn’t give you a virtually empty desktop with no icons; you will see the same real desktop across all of your virtual desktops (for lack of a better way to phrase this). What makes the virtual desktop different is that any new applications you open on it don’t appear on other desktops, and vice versa.
Your new desktops are separate environments, not sandboxes per se . Easily move windows between desktops by right-clicking them in task view.
You can also right-click applications in Task View and configure them to appear on all virtual desktops that you create — either for the currently running instance of that application, or for any future instances of the application that you open on any of your virtual desktops. work tables. The virtual desktop setting persists across computer reboots, so you don’t have to worry about complex customization going away when you’re done for the day.
Windows keyboard shortcuts guide
Microsoft’s second utility is much simpler. Install it and hold the Windows key for more than one second. When you do that, a handy little tutorial will appear that talks about all the different Windows + ??? keys + ??? shortcuts that you can use to more quickly complete various tasks. How simple it is.
Anything else?
While Microsoft prepares these first two utilities for the summer release, the company’s developers have a few more ideas. It is not yet known which of them they will start working on first, or what ideas will see the light of day (or even when), but here is a small example of future utilities that Microsoft is thinking about:
- Complete window manager including dedicated layouts for docking and undocking laptops
- Keyboard shortcut manager
- Replacement Win + R
- Improved Alt + Tab, including browser tab integration and search for running apps
- Battery tracking
- Batch file remapping
- Quickly change the resolution on the taskbar
- Mouse events without focus
- Cmd (or PS or Bash) from here
- Viewing files in the content menu