Microsoft is working on a brand-new home page for PowerToys, a must-have set of advanced Windows 10 and 11 utilities. The idea is to provide customers with a "more upfront system" for the first-time or post-update launch, plus a crispier feature-rich home page for settings.
The upcoming redesign will make it easier to tell if a specific utility is on oroff (and run or disable it if necessary), provide quick insights into shortcuts and extra features (like remapping a key using Keyboard Manager or launching Hosts File Editor), and offer links to more settings for a specific "toy."
PowerToys is an incubation system for testing new work. Some features are on be default, others off. Most of the time, we will default them to on. This, from time to time, leads to unexpected results when someone quickly invokes find my mouse or other utilities.
Although the new home page for PowerToys is in the work-in-progress state, you can check out its early mockup in a screenshot below. Developers also want to hear your thoughts about the proposed UI and its features, so be sure to ping them on Twitter or GitHub.
In case you missed it, the latest PowerToys update, version 0.72, introduced some much-needed optimizations (the app now takes notably less space on your drive) and a new plugin for Run, allowing you to generate hashes and GUID values. There is also a new feature for Mouse Highlighter and improvements for PowerRename to make it work with bigger file sets without crashing.
PowerToys is available on Windows 10 and 11 for free. You can get this great toolset from the Microsoft Store, GitHub, or winget (use the winget install --id Microsoft.PowerToys command). The project is open-source, meaning everyone with the necessary skills can contribute to the development and offer improvements or new tools.
For more great apps for Windows 10 and 11, check out this and this article.
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