The miracle of PowerToys, Microsoft's last great Windows app

(fastcompany.com)

27 points | by Foe a day ago ago

10 comments

  • nayuki a day ago ago

    > Microsoft PowerToys feels like something that shouldn’t exist in Windows today. What started in 2019 as a couple of utilities for things like window and shortcut management has gradually expanded to nearly 30 useful tools

    Year 2019? Oh no, not by a longshot. I've been using Microsoft-branded PowerToys since Windows XP, around the year 2001. Wikipedia says:

    > PowerToys are available for Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 10, and Windows 11 (and explicitly not compatible with Windows Vista, 7, 8, or 8.1).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerToys

    • GaProgMan a day ago ago

      A journalist writing about something technology relayed abd getting their facts wrong? The devil, you say?

  • neonstatic a day ago ago

    I will just note, that about two weeks ago I was trying to shrink my Parallels Windows 11 VM disk size only to discover, that PowerToys update files were stored on the drive indefinitely, accumulating over 10 gb of disk space.

  • whycome a day ago ago

    Weird, just today I saw that the powertoys directory is taking up 17gb on my computer. It’s filled with multiple installer versions I guess.

    • neonstatic a day ago ago

      Ahh, just posted about the same issue. Should have read the comments more carefully. Toys indeed.

    • chid a day ago ago

      that is wild - it seems like just a 'toy' project for them

      • riccardik 20 hours ago ago

        you're talking about windows/office/teams, right? :) seems that quality code in those times is very hard to find...

  • burnt-resistor a day ago ago

    If a user desires Windows hackery, there's also Windhawk.

    https://windhawk.net

    • eviks a day ago ago

      Indeed, this is the miracle app, not the primitive "power toys"

  • Rallen89 17 hours ago ago

    Keep this stuff on the download, if the win execs find out about this it'll have a subscription tier next week