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Sakshat
Sakshat

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Microsoft PowerToys - make a productive workflow on Windows 10

Microsoft's new open-source project

Microsoft PowerToys is a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for higher productivity - Microsoft

This project is aimed to boost productivity among the power users of the Windows platform. The most exciting thing I found using this particular tool is that it lets me configure custom tiling.

After seeing that feature, I was tempted to try it, and it's great. Props to Microsoft for making this tool, It has a lot of many features - listed down below.

Some prominent utilities

  • FancyZones - With a custom layout πŸ™Œ

FancyZones is a window manager that is designed to make it easy to arrange and snap windows into efficient layouts for your workflow and also to restore these layouts quickly. - Microsoft

  • Keyboard Manager

Custom global keymapping, remapping shortcuts, orphaning keys

  • PowerToys Run

Spotlight - like search and launcher utility

Inline calculator - I love this. ❀️❀️❀️

Other utilities

  • Image resizer
  • PowerRename
  • File Explorer Add-ons (Preview Panes)

The utilities mentioned above do batch image resizing, batch renaming β€” and an exciting feature added to the file explorer which lets you preview images, files etc.

Personal recommendation

Coming from Linux, I've been using tiling window managers for a decent amount of time. I thought to submit a recommendation (which got accepted by the team) of adding the ability to tie launch commands to certain keybinds manually.

For example, Win + W would launch your default web browser

Launch commands with keystrokes: i.e Default Web Browser #5098

Summary of the new feature/enhancement

Web browsers are used a lot, maybe add a special shortcut keybind for it?

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

Pressing Win + W should launch the default web browser

Feel free to contribute to the project by code or ideas and recommendations.

GitHub logo microsoft / PowerToys

Windows system utilities to maximize productivity

Microsoft PowerToys

Hero image for Microsoft PowerToys

How to use PowerToys | Downloads & Release notes | Contributing to PowerToys | What's Happening | Roadmap

About

Microsoft PowerToys is a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity. For more info on PowerToys overviews and how to use the utilities, or any other tools and resources for Windows development environments, head over to learn.microsoft.com!

Installing and running Microsoft PowerToys

Requirements

  • Windows 11 or Windows 10 version 2004 (code name 20H1 / build number 19041)…

Have a great day! πŸ’™πŸ’™

Top comments (2)

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hectormm profile image
Hectormm

Awesome project!

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sakshatshinde profile image
Sakshat

Yep, pretty handy!