You may remember PowerToys, a set of tiny handy utilities which were first introduced in Windows 95. Probably, most users will recollect TweakUI and QuickRes, which were really useful. The last version of the classic PowerToys suite was released for Windows XP. In 2019, Microsoft announced that they are reviving PowerToys for Windows and making them open source. Windows 10 powertoys obviously are completely new and different, tailored for the new operating system.
The revived PowerToys project can be found on GitHub.
As of now, Windows 10 PowerToys include the following apps.
- PowerRename - a tool that is intended to help you rename a large number of files using various naming conditions like search and replace a portion of the file name, define regular expressions, change letter case, and more. PowerRename is implemented as a shell extension for File Explorer (read plugin). It opens a dialog box with a bunch of options.
- FancyZones - 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. FancyZones allows the user to define a set of window locations for a desktop that are drag targets for windows. When the user drags a window into a zone, the window is resized and repositioned to fill that zone.
- Windows key shortcut guide - The Windows key shortcut guide is a full screen overlay utility that provides a dynamic set of Windows key shortcuts that are applicable for the given desktop and currently active window. When the Windows key is held down for one second, (this time can be tuned in settings), an overlay appears on the desktop showing all available Windows key shortcuts and what action those shortcuts will take given the current state of the desktop and active window. If the Windows key continues to be held down after a shortcut is issued, the overlay will remain up and show the new state of the active window.
Keyboard Manager
PowerToys Keyboard Manager is a new app that allows remapping keys to a different function. An example is remapping the “Tab” key to “Delete”. With it, all the keys on your keyboard are dynamic and can be remapped to provide different outputs.
The progress and project goals can be seen here.
UI mockups
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I like the one’s at the top but the keyboard one sounds scary.
Once installed, it indicated that I had to have a Microsoft Mouse or Keyboard in order to work. Unless I am missing something, useless as is.
Why is this only for Windows 10?
Since these are all open source, can someone please make a branch and compile them for Windows 7 and 8.1?
Well there are certainly already apps for previous versions of windows that do what these can do, and far more. For example Rename-It! does everything PowerRename can do and more, and KeyTweak works well for keyboard remapping.
Oh, and I hoped this Keyboard Manager might fix the input language selection broken in recent Windows 10 versions… it doesn’t.