Hands-On Windows 166 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take another look at PowerToys. It's been a while and a lot of improvements and one major new tool that is immediately useful.

TWIT.tv [00:00:13]:
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Paul Thurrott [00:00:22]:
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to take a look at PowerToys. It's been a while. We have certainly talked about PowerToys several times over the years. This is that set of free utilities that Microsoft makes available. You can get it from the Microsoft Store. It keeps growing, it keeps getting better. A lot of these things feel like features that are going to be added to Windows later because actually that has happened and there's been some big changes since the last time we spoke, including a new UI for the front end for all of the utilities, kind of the main app part of it, and also a major new app addition, which I love and I think almost all of you are going to want to use immediately.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:03]:
It's much needed. Before we get to that, though, let's just recap here. Some of the things that are available. And I'm not going to go through the whole list, there's so many of them. But in fact, if you look at this is the new front end. So these are all contracted now. But if you, you know, open these things up, you can see there's just dozens and dozens of utilities in here. And one of the things you can do here is just go through, disable the ones you're not going to use, right.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:30]:
And so when I look at these checkboxes here, I already know this actually off the top of my head, but these are the ones I use, right? So always on top is terrific. This is a way you can just point to any window and say, no matter what is going on in Windows, this thing is always going to be on top of the other windows, which is fantastic. Awake is a utility I use when I have two laptops side by side. I'm playing a video game over here, but I need to keep track of work. I'm writing between things. And this will keep the PC from going to sleep or turning the screen off for whatever amount of time. I usually set it at two hours, but you can do whatever you want there. Command palette, right? Which is the.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:08]:
This interface here. So this is like that. I've got the name of the interface of Mac os, which they don't have a start menus, but they can run apps this way or Find things and do. You can run batch files and so forth. There's all kinds of stuff you can do here. It's really powerful. But if you just wanted to run an app, for example, you could run Notepad, kind of a successor of PowerToys Run, which is the older version of that app. Find my mouse.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:33]:
Embarrass to say I use this so much. This isn't as much of a problem here. I'm in dark mode right now, but when it's in light mode, you can see like this tiny little thing. I lose track of the cursor all the time. So you hit the. I just did it on the wrong screen. That's funny. I have multiple screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:50]:
There it goes. You hit the control key, the left control key twice, and it focuses in. Then once you start, you know you can hit it again. It goes away. So it's. It's this fun little game I play. It's called where's my Mouse? And then I use that thing to find that keyboard manager lets you remap any key to do anything or to do nothing, which is perfect if you don't want to use the copilot key, because you can map it to do nothing. If the copilot key is next to your left arrow key, for example, you could map it to left arrow.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:18]:
So it's like you mishit it and it just goes left. You know, it's. It doesn't do anything. So you can do that as well. Peek is a really cool tool. So I get this one. Also inspired by the Mac. If you've ever used a Mac, you know that you can select a file in the finder and then hit the spacebar and it will show you a preview of that thing and then hit space again to get rid of it or just escape or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:40]:
And now we can do that. This as well. It's not working. For some reason. It's break is added. I'm sorry. Let me. Let me see if I can.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:49]:
Can do something to fix that. But it should just be spacebar. Yeah, Let me try that one more time. Oh, actually it's enabled. Yeah. So yeah, so you should be able to hit space. There we go. All right.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:58]:
So you get a preview window. The nice thing about this is that it also works with documents of various times. I write and markdown, but these could be Microsoft Word files, etc. Etc. Let me see if I could find one that actually has text in it. Most of these are things I'm kind of working on, so they're not complete Documents, but I guess not. So I will just. Well, here's one I'm kind of in progress.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:21]:
So hit space and the text comes up right useful. It's nice. It's kind of, you know, it literally is what it sounds like. It's a preview of something. So depending on the app you're that would launch, it could take a little while. You might not. It's like you might get the into it be like, oh, it's the wrong one and go try to find it. It's a really neat utility.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:40]:
So that's a good one that I use all the time. And actually I do not use power rename and I'm not sure and I do not use that. So there you go. I guess I got lazy toward the end there. So that's most of what I use in PowerToys. And right after this message, we're going to take a look at a new tool.

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Paul Thurrott [00:07:47]:
All right, welcome back. So in addition to this new front end, you can see the new here there is a new tool which I have been using as soon as I found out about it. And you can see it's going bright because that's what this thing does. So if you're familiar with how Windows works today, you know that we have. Let me bring up settings here. We have capabilities tied to the display, like night light. Right. And so night light is this thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:14]:
It's actually on here, but I can turn it on schedule. And the way that this works is it will. Or it will color the screen a little bit orange, which you can't actually see, unfortunately in the recording, but from whatever set hours you want or from sunset to sunrise. Right. And that's how I usually set that up. It's pretty cool. And if you go into personalize, we have this colors interface and you have three choices here. So you have dark mode.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:40]:
Light mode, Right. So we can put it back on dark mode and custom and custom is just a way to have a different setting for both windows and then the apps that are running. So I could have windows and dark or apps and light or whatever. So you can see this taskbar down here, still dark, but the app itself is light. Right. So unfortunately it doesn't have an automatic setting. There's no way to do a sunset, the sunrise or whatever. The best we can get is if you go to the homepage here.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:08]:
This is one of the settings that's Almost for me at least, is always here. So you can launch settings, you know, Windows key. Plus I it scroll down a little bit and we can switch it right here. You could do that if you really know what you're doing. I have a shortcut somewhere in my file system for double clicking. It just goes right to that page. And settings, you could do that kind of thing I guess as well. But light switch is what makes this happen automatically.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:30]:
So it's like night light, but for dark and light mode. Right. So it's not set this way by default. It's actually manual and you can enter the times, but I want it to be sunrise or sunset. To sunrise, it will ask you at the time you've already done it, but it'll ask you to set your location. So if I click that now, it's going to look at where I am. I'm in Mexico City. So it's going to come up with some sort of a latitude, longitude kind of a deal here.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:55]:
And as I record this, the sun rises here at 6:30am we're pretty close to the equator, so these things, this doesn't change too much. But sunset is at 6:12. Now, of course, if you're, you know, where I was in Boston or in Pennsylvania or at some other part of the globe, these things could be quite different. Right. And so we'll keep track of that, which is really good. And you can do an offset, which is actually kind of awesome. Right. So you might not want it to go to dark mode immediately.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:21]:
When the sun sets, there's still ambient light in the sky, et cetera. You might want it to be 30 minutes later and you can set that here. So that's really neat. They also have this capability to do different settings for system and apps, which is that Windows and app setting that we saw in the Settings app. Right. And so I don't do that, but I want everything dark or everything light. But they let you do that here. So this thing, you know, PowerToys, runs when your computer starts up, so this thing will always be running.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:49]:
It's not taking up a lot of space, it's not taking up a lot of resources, etc. But this thing runs in the background. And now it works the way Windows should work. And it's hard to imagine this thing not becoming part of Windows in the future. I am going to temporarily turn this off because this thing is blinding me when I record. I don't like to have the screen on light mode, although I do use it that way normally during the day. But night mode at night. So now it works the way I want it to work.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:14]:
It's cool. The one thing it doesn't fix, by the way, is one of the other weird problems with dark mode in Windows is certain interfaces, classic interfaces, are always going to be in light mode, even if you're in dark mode, right? So the screen's in dark mode. If I open options here, this is white, right? It's not doing the dark mode thing. I have a bunch of big videos here. If I just to get a file copy going. If I were to start these things copying, you'll see this progress dialog. I'll just pause that because we're going to stop it. But as you can see, this thing is in light mode and that's not what you want.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:53]:
Microsoft is in fact updating Windows 11 to make at least some of those interfaces support dark mode accurately. Right. So that I know the file progress is one of those. So when that happens, we'll talk about that as it happens. But that's in the works. It is happening. But if you're running 24 or 25H2, you can look forward to that. And then otherwise you should still get this.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:17]:
Get PowerToys, if only for light switch, because this is so necessary. I can't believe this isn't part of Windows. But you know, that's what we get. Alrighty. Well, I hope you found this useful. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at Twitter tv. H O W thank you so much for watching.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:36]:
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