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Hands-On Windows 184: Power Toys Update 4/2026
00:18:34
The Best Windows Utilities Just Got Smarter
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- [00:00]
Paul Thurat
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to look at another major update to PowerToys. And this is a good one.
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TWIT Announcer
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Paul Thurat
Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to look at another update to PowerToys. I've talked about PowerToys a lot, but they keep improving it. They keep adding new utilities to this little tool set of utilities that they have. This one, there's no new utilities, but there are major new capabilities for some of the existing utilities, including a couple that I use all the time. This is a, this is a really good update. The version number on this, by the way, is 0.98, so it still hasn't hit 1.0. Somehow it must be getting close, right? And to me this seems really, really full featured. But you know, let's take a quick look. So the main PowerToy settings app is, is this thing you see here, and this is where you can access all of the various utilities you can enable and disable the ones that you want. I've talked about this before, but there are certain apps or I guess utilities that are part of power toys that I literally use every single day. So you can see them here, they're checked off. The ones that are enabled are the ones I use all the time. So always on top. Obviously you could bring up an application window or whatever window and use a keyboard shortcut which is Windows key plus Control T. And you see it's by default, it's got this big blue outline. And even though I'm clicking on the window behind here, this thing stays on top as you would expect. And then you can control Windows T to get rid of that. So that's kind of a fun one. Awake is real simple. This has got this cute little coffee cup icon down here in the tray. And this lets you keep this screen on for some amount of time. You could keep it on indefinitely. I'll do this sometimes when I'm playing video games. I want to keep a work screen on on a different computer and make sure I'm up to date in case anything's going on while I'm over here on a different computer or whatever machine gaming and. But whatever the use case, I mean, that's pretty useful for obvious reasons. Command Palette is one of those ones we're going to look at today. And I think by default this is probably Windows key alt plus space, but I reconfigure that to Windows key plus space. And so this is a sort of start menu replacement in the sense that I could type the name of an app here if I could type and run it from here, right, which is the app I just ran. But it also does a bunch of other things. They have extensions, you can get into settings, you can search files, etc. Etc. So this is a super useful tool, obviously, cursor wrap. So this one's a little hard to demonstrate because I have a multi screen setup going here and I have a screen to the left and a screen below. So either direction I go, the mouse's cursor is going to be lost for a bit. But in this case I'll go to the top of the screen. It disappears. It's actually on the bottom screen. So as I keep moving up, it will come up from the bottom right. And so the idea there is that, you know, whether you have one screen or multiple screens, you can zip the mouse around and instead of having to go all the way across, maybe what is a gigantic screen, you can just wrap it around, you know, like you see in a lot of different applications. One of my favorites, in fact, this is arguably my favorite game that I play with myself or by myself, I should say, in Windows 11, which is where's the mouse cursor? I can see it right now because it's white and it's a black background. But with this utility running, you can hit the control key twice and it will show you exactly where it is. I love this thing. I probably use that at least, I bet half a dozen times a day. It's fantastic. Keyboard manager I'm actually going to look at later because this is one of the ones that they've updated in a nice way. But the short version is that you can map individual keys or keyboard shortcuts to do various things, including some pretty complex tasks. I use it for really simple stuff. I don't like the copilot key, so I will map that to whatever the key is to the right. On most laptops that's the left arrow key. So if I hit it by mistake, it will just do a left arrow. On this particular laptop that I'm using to record this, there's actually an extra control key over there. So in this case I've just mapped it to control because that's what's there. Light switch I had to override for this recording. But the way this works is on a set schedule, or you could just do from dawn to dusk or whatever. You can have it be automatic light Mode, Automatic dark mode. This is obviously something that should just be built into Windows, but it isn't. So this utility adds that and then Peek is awesome. Peek is a feature from the Mac where in this case I've got these screenshots. Right. And so I'll just. None of these are really that great, but the idea here is that. And I think it might. This might be a different keyboard shortcut by default, but I do I change it to be the keyboard shortcut that it is on the Mac, which is you hit the space key and nothing happens. So maybe I didn't change it. Well, it's supposed to do a little peek. Oh, there it is. Well, oh, I just loaded the thing. So it's supposed to. It's not doing it for some reason, but. Okay, well, this. It might be misconfigured on this computer. I should look at that. But look at it right now. Oh, it's control space on this computer. I'm sorry. So let me go back. This is just such a fun one. I love this one so much. Let me find that. I'll find a different image, I guess. Or will I? Here we go. Nope. Alt spaces, that little menu there. Oh, there it goes. Okay, that was a tortured demo, but you get the idea. And then you can. I usually do change that to space, but control space again to get rid of it. So there you go. Okay, so I believe that is most of what I use already. Yes. Okay, so what's changed? We'll look at that next right after this break.
- [05:58]
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- [08:43]
Paul Thurat
Okay, as far as the changes in this version of PowerToys, the biggest one to me is to the command palette. So again, this is the I keep hitting the wrong keyboard shortcuts. This is that pop up. It's like Spotlight search, right? And if you use a Mac or if you've ever seen a Mac, it works much like that. But what they've done is they've added a new feature which is really cool and depending on your needs and the way you want to work, this is either going to be something you're going to want to use immediately or you're just going to wonder why I'm even talking about it. But you enable the dock and what you get is this kind of a toolbar looking thing here at the top. So it's like another taskbar. You can move it to other sides of the screen, which you cannot do with the taskbar right now. Right? One way that you could use this would be to go into taskbar settings and change it so that the taskbar always hides, which I actually do on a lot of my systems and it almost acts now. So I would say command Palette in many ways is like a replacement for Start command Palette plus this doc enabled in some ways is a replacement for Start plus the taskbar. Sort of. Sort of. And you'll see, you'll see what I mean by that. I'm actually gonna put. If I could ever figure it out, right, because the stupid cursor wrapped thing on. Well, I guess I'm leave the taskbar off because I could fix that. But this, this might be a way that a lot of people are going to use this thing. Let me move that little guy out of the way. Okay, so now in this configuration, this actually looks a little bit like a Mac. You know, not to keep going to that little. Well, but what's interesting about this is that you've got these on screen things for clock and whatever. And this is nice because if you do hide the taskbar, you can't see the clock. And that was one of the little issues I had with it. You've got these kind of system settings. These are kind of like task manager type settings for, you know, CPU member utilization, so forth. You can turn those off if you don't want them there. By default, you get an icon now for Command palette. So you can bring up that interface by just by clicking that thing. And then I think this one is probably a file. I'm sorry, I get this cursor wrap thing on. Oh, it's find apps I wouldn't get. I'm sorry, it's not a file search, but those are there by default. I've added a couple of other extensions. And so if you go into settings here, you'll see that Command Palette supports a bunch of extensions. You can also go to the Microsoft Store and browse through the available extensions. I installed a couple just to have something here. This isn't working very well on this particular computer, but I could switch to balance mode. It's actually on best performance right now. And then the currency converter is kind of interesting. So you could type in something like if I could type again, some kind of a currency like Euros, and then see what that is in US Dollars and in other currencies. Right. Without having to, you know, switch out of whatever app you're using or, you know, open a new browser tab and Google that kind of thing or whatever. So this is kind. This is very interesting to me. The other one is if I just run this normally, you can. There's some suggestions here. I can right click and pin these things to the dock, right. Which is what I did with these extensions. So now this particular this is actually an extension, as it turns out, but this extension is now available directly from the doc. So I can do that file search thing right from here. The only thing you can't pin, which is why it's not quite a taskbar replacement, is apps. And so if I right click on an app, what you don't get is pin. Right? And I feel like that has to be coming. You know, it just seems like such an obvious feature and the ability to mix and match shortcuts to apps, if that ever happens. Extensions is, turns this thing into like a full featured start slash taskbar replacement, like I was saying. So that's really cool. So hopefully, or maybe you think that's interesting, but there's more I mentioned I'm gonna have to bring up the tab. I'm have to fix this because I use it so much. Let's bring the taskbar back here. So down in the tray is. Oh, actually I'm already running the app. So I have this interface for all of the powertray settings and I can go over to. In this case, I'm going to look for Keyboard Manager now. I think I've already enabled this change, but let me just look at this real quick. Yeah, I've already turned it on, so. Oh, okay. Actually I can turn it back. So by default you. They have an interface for mapping keys, right? And so right here you can see it's F23, which is copilot key. I've mapped it the right control key, which on this laptop is the thing that's right next to it. And if we look at the editor, this is what this has looked like to date, right? And this is actually kind of a weird interface. If I click ok, you're going to see it's. It's like, oh, it doesn't have an assignment, which it actually still does with the new editor, but now you can enable a new editor. And so this is a modern interface and we can bring this thing up and now we just have a. It's a prettier thing. It will bring forward all of the shortcuts you have already. So whatever you did before, you're not going to lose that. You can do a new mapping, you can edit a mapping, you can also delete it or just toggle it off. So if you have a bunch of these, I only use a couple usually, or actually mostly one depending on the computer. But you could toggle some on, some off however you want it. So it's just kind of a nicer way to do this. And then Let me. We should look at this too. So just a slightly more obvious screen. So if I wanted to do something like this, remapping will do this thing right. And it could map to a certain key or a keyboard shortcut. It could be for like kind of an advanced paste type tool where you insert some text, which is kind of cool. Open a specific URL, open a specific app. Right. And you can also now limit it to a specific app, which is also good. So this is a much nicer interface than was the case before. And I'm not going to edit that because I'll still get that same error. But that's nice. I think that's just a nice one. That's a good quality of life thing. Cursor wrap. So this is the thing I've been using here that's making me crazy. The way I want to configure this is I actually want Cursor wrap to work on single screen configurations, like just using a laptop. But I actually don't want it to use. I don't actually want to use it here because this gets confusing. I have three screens. It's a little bit much. I close the powertoy app like an idiot. So let me bring that back. Oh, I did the wrong one. Sorry. Settings, but they have improved this as well. And let me see. Cursor wrap. But not for what I want. Right. And so what they've done is they've added some new features and one of them is the ability to. Where is this thing? Somewhere in here. Oh, I'm in the wrong one. That's why is the ability to disable wrapping when using a single monitor, which is not what I want. So it's still doing it with this multi screen configuration I have. But what I want is the opposite. But some people will probably find that useful. And you can also set up a key. That's not where you do that. You can set up a key here rather where you can. No, that's not it either. Where is the key? Oh, I'm sorry. Here it is. So if you don't want it just to wrap automatically, you could have it wrap only when you can hold down the controller shift key. Right. So that's useful too. So you could enable it when you, if you're thinking about it, know how to do that. You can do that kind of thing. So also useful. And then I showed you that Always on Top tool. And just as a reminder, it's control windows key +t. And then you get. It made a sound and you get the blue border and then you can do that again. But there's an option now in powertoy Settings where you can right click in the title bar of an app and actually just access that always on top option. From there, you don't have to memorize a keyboard shortcut. That's super obvious. And so that's, you know, that's super useful. That's good. Bismore There are several other improvements. I mean, none of them are as maybe interesting as the ones I just showed you. But if you use zoomit, which is the former System Sysinternals tool, there's a little video editor in there so you can trim the beginning and end of screen recordings, which is useful. There's a tool called New plus that I'm not using that lets you remove the new context menu that is in File Explorer. So when you go to the desktop in this case and you get this new menu, you can actually get rid of that and just use new plus instead. Advanced paste has some proof, hotkeys support, etc. There's a bunch of other stuff, but to me this, the command palette with the dock here at the top and the keyboard manager stuff is just huge. So big, big update, lots of good stuff. This is a utility everyone who use Windows should be using. I love power toys. I love that it's gotten better and I hope you found this useful. So we'll be back with a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the show at TWIT tv. Ho w thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you're not a member of Club Twit, please consider joining. You can learn more about that program at Twitt tv. Club Twit Twit. Thanks. I'll see you next week.