Microsoft PowerToys. If you haven't heard me
talk about it before, it's an incredibly useful set of tools for Windows that is published by
Microsoft. And since my last video about this, they've gone through several updates
and added a bunch of new tools. So I figured I'd make an updated video
with those new tools and features. If you want to install it, there's two main
ways. One is right through the Microsoft Store, and also you can get it from Microsoft's
GitHub page. They have the releases on there. The current version is 0.73. Just to
be sure, if you install it from the Microsoft Store that you have it check for updates,
so you know that it has the latest version. So let's just get into the new tools, starting
off with the System Tray Quick Launch Menu. Now, if you click the icon in the system tray, it pops
up a menu with shortcuts for certain tools. This might not exactly be a tool in itself, but I think
it still counts. And I will note that it's not going to show a shortcut for every single tool,
because for some of them it wouldn't make sense. But these are the ones that do show at the
moment if all tools are enabled. And you can also click the "More" button to look
through all the possible tools and enable them or disable them from there. Next up, we
have Mouse Without Borders, which is pretty cool. It basically lets you use your cursor for
your mouse across multiple devices seamlessly. I believe all the computers
have to be on the same network, but you basically generate a key on the
one computer and put it into the other, which allows it to connect. You can even choose
to have it share the clipboard across the different devices and even use the clipboard
to share and move files under a certain size. I believe at the moment it's a hundred
megabytes. There's also lots of other settings you can look through having to do
with security or how the mouse cursor behaves, but you can just look through those.
Moving on, we have Paste As Plain Text, which is pretty self-explanatory. Basically,
if you have any text in the clipboard that has formatting, such as font size or
color or underline, something like that, if you use the Paste As Plain Text shortcut, it
will paste it without all that formatting. Just the raw text. Which usually means that the program
itself will decide what the formatting will be. So it usually will match the content that you're
pasting it into. The next new tool is called Peek, which in file explorer with the shortcut,
it lets you preview files pretty quickly. I actually could not get this one to work
in my case. It opened up the window, but didn't actually show anything, but
you can see what it should look like. And also if a preview window is open, you
can use the arrow keys to navigate through other files to preview. All right, next
up, we have the new tool Registry Preview, which lets you open .reg registry files
and see what's in them. But in a way that is a lot easier than the normal way, which
is to open it with notepad or something, which can be very unreadable
depending on how much is in there. With this new tool, you can see it
does show you the text on the left, but also on the right-hand side, the key
and value structure that you'd normally see with the Registry Editor. And you can also
have it open the Registry Editor directly to the key if you want. So you don't have
to search for it. And if you click on different keys in that window, it'll also
update and show you what's in that below. Another neat thing that I noticed is if
the reg file would delete a certain key, it'll actually show that with a trashcan
icon. So that's pretty neat. Now the next tool is Crop and Lock, and this one's
pretty cool. When you press the shortcut, it lets you select a region of the current
program and whatever you outline and select, it will create a second new window
just with that selected region. And it actually updates it in real
time if the original window changes, and also the cropped window will stay on top.
This could definitely be useful, for example, if you need to reference another program, but
you don't want to have that programs window all the way open and blocking something. There's also
this "Reparent" option with a separate shortcut, where instead of creating a copy window that's
cropped, it actually crops the original window. And then when you close the cropped version, it
reopens the original. One quick thing to note, if you want to use this tool on a
program that's running as administrator, you also have to have PowerToys running
as administrator. And the next new tool is actually part of the Mouse Utilities
set. And this is called Mouse Jump. When you go to use this with
the shortcut, it will bring up a small image of all your monitors for
your computer. And wherever you click, it moves your mouse to the place you clicked
on your actual monitors. Probably useful if you have a bunch of screens, though I noticed
that the default shortcut is kind of clunky. So you might want to remap that. So
those are all the completely new tools, but a lot of the other existing tools
also got some features added. So here's some of the notable ones that I noticed.
First of all, the Keyboard Manager tool, which lets you remap keys, now supports
the numpad. So you can remap those keys. Also the Text Extractor tool,
one of my personal favorites, now lets you change the default language to
any other ones that you have installed. Just be sure to read the thing that talks
about installing the proper optical character recognition packs to go along
with any additional languages you install. Next for the PowerToys Run tool, this
already has a ton of functionality, so I'm not going to be able to cover it
all, but a couple of things they added is now you can use it to open MSC files,
which are like management consoles, such as the Group Policy Editor. You couldn't
before, apparently. They also added several new plugins, which lets you kind of select specific
functionality that you want to enable or disable. One of them lets you list the
currently running processes, if you just want to look through
those. It's called Window Walker, and it's activated using the "<" sign you
type in. Another new one is the value generator, which is activated with the "#" sign. And
this can actually do a bunch of stuff. For example, you can have it generate
a random GUID, or you can also have it encode or decode Base64 text strings. So you
can look at Microsoft's documentation page for [PowerToys] Run to see all the other stuff
it can do, because there's quite a lot. And finally for you IT managers out there, you should
probably know that all releases of PowerToys now include a set of group policy objects you can
install, which should make it easier to deploy a bunch of machines with PowerToys and only
specific tools enabled if you want to do that. All right. So I believe I covered all the
main new features, or at least the ones that I thought were interesting. Let me know
down in the comments, if I maybe missed any, or if there are some underrated features
you think are really cool. And again, I only talked about new tools since
my last video. I'll put links to my previous ones in the description if you
want to see examples of all of them. So if you enjoyed this video, be sure to give
it a very small thumbs up, not a big thumbs up, only a small one this time. And if you want to
subscribe, I try to make videos about twice a week, usually Wednesday and Saturday. And if
you want to keep watching, I'll put links to the previous two videos I made about PowerToys,
so you can see all the tools right there. So thanks so much for watching
and I'll see in the next one.
