Paul Throt (0:00)

Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a Look at Windows PowerToys, a set of utilities made by Microsoft and also by individuals in the community that makes Windows better.

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Paul Throt (2:05)

This is twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thrott and this week we're going to take a step outside of Windows in a way. We're going to look at a set of utilities that's very popular. You've probably heard of them called Windows Power Toys or just Power toys. We've had things like this for many years. Back in the windows 9x days we had those plus packs, remember in windows 7 and I think beyond we had something called Windows Essentials a set of utilities that Microsoft advertised as sort of completing the Windows experience. But we've also had this notion of PowerToys, right? And in the beginning, I think the earliest PowerToys actually date back to the late 1990s. But I always think of the version they made for Windows xp, where it was just a set of utilities that didn't quite make the os. And back then, Microsoft couldn't really update Windows very quickly. And so it was a way to kind of get these features out into the world in a way that if you wanted them, you could get them and you could enable each individually. Flash forward 20, whatever years, 25 years. Ish. And we still have PowerToys. So we have PowerToys for Windows 11 today. It's available in the store. It's perpetually in beta. Some of these features are at various stages of not completion, but spit shine, fit and finish, whatever. Some of the better ones have been rolled into Windows, which is actually really exciting. In Windows 11, I think. 23H2, Microsoft added that details view in File Explorer that started as a power toy. The text extractor capability that's in snipping tool today, for example, is still a powertoy. And the powertoy app is quite different from what it used to be. It is still a set of different apps, but it has this central app that's gone. It's gotten kind of big. It's the one thing I really don't like about it. And so they created this quick access pane. So when PowerToys is running, you'll see the item for it here in the tray. There's also this little coffee cup icon. This is for a tool called PowerToys Awake, which runs by default. This is one I don't actually use. It's not running, right? It is running, but it's not doing its thing right now. But I do use the PowerToys front end. You can customize this. So it has your most commonly used apps. I haven't done that here. These are the defaults, but you can also just go into the full app. And so this is the app. It's this giant thing. And so this dashboard page is where you can individually toggle on or off each of the toys. Right. The utility is kind of a strange name. And you can go down a list. You can explore this for yourself. If we just select. I'll select what I'm not going to really talk about command not found, for example. So it explains what's going on here. They always have a link here. This will Open the Microsoft Learn website to a page that has information about the tools. If you want to learn more, learn how it works, et cetera, et cetera. That's how you can do that. The versioning here is kind of tough. Like I said, it's always in beta. But in recent months they've added a major new feature to PowerToys, a major new tool called Workspaces. And Workspaces is sort of a power user version, I guess of Snap layouts in a way, right? So you have this workspace you've got meaning a screen or multiple screens where you've arranged ways Windows in a certain way. You have a specific set of apps running and you want to save it as a thing that has a name that you can call up later and recover that set. It's actually a set of layouts, right? So it's sort of an uber version, I guess of Snap layouts. So I'm not really going to demonstrate it per se. I don't have any tools that make sense to use this way. But you could sort of imagine, you know, maybe you're a coder, you have the coding window, you've got this reference that you're looking at to help you with the coding or maybe you're doing research where it's a website and a note taking app or whatever, you can just save those things and reference them later. And so this is the type of thing I actually expect Microsoft to add to Windows. I think this is a good candidate for that. And I think it's the type of thing that is a little bit more mainstream than even the remote desktop feature we looked at recently, the desktops in Windows 11. I think this is the type of thing a lot of people would use. So this is kind of interesting. This is the new marquee feature, I guess the big one. But There are several PowerToys apps that I do use pretty regularly. This isn't my system, so this isn't my account. So what we're seeing here is not my kind of customized setup. So I do different things with my own account. I've configured some of these specifically. But if you think back to the clipboard discussion we had in the multitasking episode talked about how Windows obviously has Control C, Control V, Control X, all that stuff built in. There's a clipboard history you can enable. So you do Windows key + whatever, Windows key + V typically to bring up the, you know, that window with the different things that are in a clipboard. But one thing I need all the time because of the type of writing I do, I often pull information from someplace and I want it pasted as text. So there's an advanced paste that's part of the PowerToys. So instead of winkey plus V, you get window winkey plus shift V. So I'll have to invent a reason to use this, but we'll go in and it integrates with the stuff that's built into Windows, right? So I'll just select this. So again, instead of when, you know, WinKey+V brings up the clipboard history, but Windows Key +Shift +V brings up this window, which is really interesting. And it has the one thing I want. This is what I want right here. Now, depending on the app, there are keyboard shortcuts for this. It's hard to remember these things. Control Shift V often does this, but some apps don't support it. So this is kind of a neat way to get this in any app very quickly. So I don't really have anything that's rich text or whatever that would benefit from this right now. But this is a really cool tool for me, at least it's something I actually use all the time, so it's really useful. The other one I use all the time. So for this, I do a lot of. I write a lot of news reports about Microsoft and other companies when they report their earnings. So, for example, I know if I go to Microsoft.com investor you'll see their latest earnings report. They're doing okay, by the way. You don't have to worry about them financially. I think they're going to be okay. But I go through, say, their column slides, right? And they'll have financial information in here, so I'll find. And they actually provide this information here in this case. But there's some instances where they provide numbers, and then they have the number from a year ago. And so what I want to do is bring up the calculator and I will have this thing running on top of it, like you can see here, and I'll have the numbers that I'm trying to compare. So if I want to know, you know, what percent of the total revenues is this part of Microsoft? I can do that math in the calculator, and then I can go paste that into whatever story I'm writing. But the problem is this thing keeps getting lost. So I find myself Control, you know, control Tab Control or, you know, sorry, Alt tab, Alt tab, trying to get back to the application window. So this thing supports a keyboard shortcut? Well, any app does, actually. PowerToys has an app called Always on Top. So It's Control Windows key +t and you can see that it has this kind of selection. Windows, right. So now even though I've selected this window, that thing still stays on the top and it stays. Well, you can move it, I mean you can move it wherever you want, but it stays on the top. So if I launch another app, it's going to launch behind there. I close it and if I bring it back, it's back to the way it was. It doesn't retain that mode or whatever, but it's a neat thing to toggle. It's something I actually use. And as we record this, it's that time of year, right? So we're getting that time of quarter, I guess we're getting a lot of financial results in and some companies just don't do the math for you. So I have to do the math and that's a tool I use for that.