Yeeeeeup. One of the first things install. Keyboard remap (swap caps and control), the launcher, and fancy zones or whatever. Oh and Power Rename is a MUST have
Yeeeeeup. One of the first things install.
Keyboard remap (swap caps and control), the launcher, and fancy zones or whatever.
This had been a solid necessity for over a decade for me, though that decade started before I gave up Windows in 2019. I still managed to convince an IT person to let me have Process Explorer on...
This had been a solid necessity for over a decade for me, though that decade started before I gave up Windows in 2019.
I still managed to convince an IT person to let me have Process Explorer on my work laptop >:D (not PowerToys, but akin).
Some of the ones I adored were the advanced paste (now I believe works with ctrl-alt-v in most applications), grab and move (native in i3 bwahaha), and keyboard manager (I totally forgot that was a PT thing, as I spent a decent amount of time in Germany and needed to swap between US and DE layouts).
Gonna give a huge middle finger to peek, which was incorporated into Win8 (or 7, but I never ran 7, so not sure, but was definitely carried over into 10 and now 11), and while it's been toned down, I hate it and can't turn it off.
PowerToys is an instant install on any Windows computer I have. The one that gets the most use out of me is the colour picker. Win+Shift+C and there's a little floaty thing that says what colour...
PowerToys is an instant install on any Windows computer I have.
The one that gets the most use out of me is the colour picker. Win+Shift+C and there's a little floaty thing that says what colour the pixel I'm hovering is. Scroll the scroll wheel and a popup appears with a frozen snapshot of the area around it, so you can be more accurate with the selection. Honestly that on its own gets a lot of use from me, as I use it to check spacing between elements when I want to prove that something isn't centred properly.
Text Extractor is useful too. A simple shortcut, drag a region, and now the text you selected is on the clipboard. It'd be nice if it had a sound, but at this point I trust it enough. There's a warning saying you should use the snipping tool's OCR instead, but that's a multi-step process (take screenshot, open screenshot, select button, select area) which is a lot more than using a shortcut and selecting the area.
File Locksmith is useful for exactly one situation: a mystery process has locked a file and you want it dead. Sometimes it needs to be run as admin, but there's a nice handy button to relaunch it right in the UI. Find the process, kill it, delete the file.
I use a lot of the others as well, but I wanted to highlight some of what I think are the lesser-used tools that have become an essential part of my toolkit over the time I've used PowerToys.
Yeeeeeup. One of the first things install.
Keyboard remap (swap caps and control), the launcher, and fancy zones or whatever.
Oh and Power Rename is a MUST have
This had been a solid necessity for over a decade for me, though that decade started before I gave up Windows in 2019.
I still managed to convince an IT person to let me have Process Explorer on my work laptop >:D (not PowerToys, but akin).
Some of the ones I adored were the advanced paste (now I believe works with ctrl-alt-v in most applications), grab and move (native in i3 bwahaha), and keyboard manager (I totally forgot that was a PT thing, as I spent a decent amount of time in Germany and needed to swap between US and DE layouts).
Gonna give a huge middle finger to peek, which was incorporated into Win8 (or 7, but I never ran 7, so not sure, but was definitely carried over into 10 and now 11), and while it's been toned down, I hate it and can't turn it off.
PowerToys is an instant install on any Windows computer I have.
The one that gets the most use out of me is the colour picker.
Win+Shift+Cand there's a little floaty thing that says what colour the pixel I'm hovering is. Scroll the scroll wheel and a popup appears with a frozen snapshot of the area around it, so you can be more accurate with the selection. Honestly that on its own gets a lot of use from me, as I use it to check spacing between elements when I want to prove that something isn't centred properly.Text Extractor is useful too. A simple shortcut, drag a region, and now the text you selected is on the clipboard. It'd be nice if it had a sound, but at this point I trust it enough. There's a warning saying you should use the snipping tool's OCR instead, but that's a multi-step process (take screenshot, open screenshot, select button, select area) which is a lot more than using a shortcut and selecting the area.
File Locksmith is useful for exactly one situation: a mystery process has locked a file and you want it dead. Sometimes it needs to be run as admin, but there's a nice handy button to relaunch it right in the UI. Find the process, kill it, delete the file.
I use a lot of the others as well, but I wanted to highlight some of what I think are the lesser-used tools that have become an essential part of my toolkit over the time I've used PowerToys.