Microsoft Powertoys!

March 8, 2020 8:45 PM

One of the coolest things about Windows 95 were the Powertoys, a number of freeware utilities made by Microsoft employees, many originating from tools that the developers made for their own use. For a good number of years the Powertoys were a beloved part of the power user experience until, following the Windows XP release, they were abolished, as part of the general Microsoft trend away from fun and unsupported tools. But now... the Powertoys are back.

The standout Powertoy from days gone by was always TweakUI, which sadly has yet to make a return, and what is there is pretty minimal so far. But the project is ongoing. What is available currently is:

FancyZones: A window management tool.
Shortcut: Have problems remembering all those hotkeys? Hold the Windows key down and get a quick fullscreen reference.
PowerRename: A shell extension that lets you rename multiple files using search and replace or regexes.

Utilities in the works include such things as an image resizer, a keyboard remapper, Explorer previews for Markdown and SVG, a GIF recorder and miscellaneous other things.

Unlike the old Powertoys, all the 'toys in this package are integrated into a single tray icon, which can be used to turn them on or off or configure them individually.

posted by JHarris (31 comments total)

Utilities in the works include such things as ... miscellaneous other things.

Oh thank GOD, I've missed that tool so much!!
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:08 PM on March 8, 2020 [5 favorites]

Whoa, I have major olde-tymey nostalgic fondness for the idea of PowerToys. In retrospect, I have to wonder how my family possibly dealt with my extensive experimentations with TweakUI. Nice to see that they're at least sort of returning!
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:52 PM on March 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

BonziBuddy did all of those things for me.
posted by newper at 9:55 PM on March 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

Oh man... BonziBuddy. A friend of mine did animation for that thing. Made the charlatan creator of it a whole bunch of money. Private jet money.
posted by bz at 10:04 PM on March 8, 2020

I’ve always been more of a Sysinternals type guy, myself.
posted by aubilenon at 10:08 PM on March 8, 2020 [18 favorites]

Oh man. I felt so "Hackerman" using TweakUI back in the day!
posted by potrzebie at 10:45 PM on March 8, 2020 [8 favorites]

Command Prompt Here? Just type 'cmd' in at the top of any Explorer window.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:48 AM on March 9, 2020 [17 favorites]

Oh, right, I don't have an xmouse on -- that's why this machine acts stupid.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:45 AM on March 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

PowerRename would quite handily replace another tool I’ve relied on for a while now. Tool works, but is a bit janky and the interface is awkward, PowerRename looks a lot more like the utility I use on macOS for rename actions. (So long as I don’t need admin rights to install it, because the only time I use Windows is on my work computer)
posted by caution live frogs at 5:01 AM on March 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Command Prompt Here? Just type 'cmd' in at the top of any Explorer window.

Well now I feel dumb.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:05 AM on March 9, 2020 [8 favorites]

I still use Synctoy. I'm not sure if that was technically a power toy but it's extremely useful.
posted by selfnoise at 5:31 AM on March 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

For nearly a decade synctoy was my primary backup too at work.
posted by bonehead at 5:44 AM on March 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Winaero Tweaker and O&O ShutUp10, Explorer++, and of course Classic Shell. For me, Windows 10 would be unusable without these. If you wear glasses and run a high-spec laptop, Windows10 DPI Fix is pretty essential too.

I also run various other bits of geekery, most of which are scripts or registry hacks, and many of which are supposed to be 'impossible' according to Microsoft official and sponsored information channels, e.g. disabling automatic updates (and enabling manual incremental updates), disabling the Windows key, utterly disabling OneDrive, Cortana and the Microsoft Store, and removing the Segoe UI font without trace. (This last one is particularly annoying. To display the taskbar clock in Tahoma, for example, you're forced to manually remap the colon character onto its Unicode version. Like so many things Microsoft, you're never quite sure whether this was neglectful or deliberate on their part).

I'm with you on SyncToy - in its simplicity and functionality it's one of very few things Microsoft have ever done that nobody else seems to have done better. (Having been released in 2009 and hardly touched since, it's also refreshingly free of spam, ads and cruft - please don't encourage them to update it.)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:10 AM on March 9, 2020 [5 favorites]

Sharpkeys will handle your key remapping needs in Win10.
posted by mhoye at 6:28 AM on March 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is this something I'd have to have a computer to understand?
posted by Naberius at 6:37 AM on March 9, 2020 [6 favorites]

I've been using FancyZones for awhile now. It's sort of a tiled window manager lite. Define a grid, windows snap to grid. It works OK but I'm not sure I love it.

The cultural shift is what seems most important here. Microsoft is finally letting its engineers release some side projects again.
posted by Nelson at 7:46 AM on March 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

I like tiling window managers for productivity purposes, but I don't really use my Windows machine for productivity these days. Still, I really like that Microsoft is putting this sort of thing out in the world.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:19 AM on March 9, 2020

These are neat--I wish we could install them at work where I have to use Windows, but it's too locked down.

The other (power) tools for Windows that I really like are 7+ Taskbar Tweaker and Listary.
posted by ropeladder at 10:13 AM on March 9, 2020

btw, the most important "power toy" for Windows is Process Explorer. That's the robust replacement for the Task Manager that gives you detailed insight into what resources various running programs are consuming. It's one of the Windows Sysinternals tools, a different side-projects-from-inside-Microsoft that have been around 15 or so years.
posted by Nelson at 10:21 AM on March 9, 2020 [9 favorites]

i remember a powertoy graphing calculator that I used in high school because I kept losing my ti-89!
posted by dismas at 10:39 AM on March 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is triggering the nostalgia circuits in my brain and I don't know how I feel about that.
posted by truex at 10:55 AM on March 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is triggering the nostalgia circuits in my brain and I don't know how I feel about that.

It looks like you're dealing with emotions triggered by recalling fond memories, would you like help with that?

( )Yes
( )No
(*) Give me a moment, Clippy
posted by otherchaz at 11:58 AM on March 9, 2020 [5 favorites]

"I’ve always been more of a Sysinternals type guy, myself."

Sysinternals are fucking awesome.

Utilities is my favorite software category. They genuinely make me very happy.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:02 PM on March 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

FANCYZONES. Oh my god, I could cry. I've been using some random third-party software to accomplish this but it's buggy and the hotkeys don't even work properly, plus many applications don't really seem to work well with it. Now I just manually resize windows like a chump.
posted by chrominance at 12:50 PM on March 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Process Explorer. That's the robust replacement for the Task Manager that gives you detailed insight into what resources various running programs are consuming.

When you need to go deeper, the companion tool Process Monitor is the next step. All file, registry, network, and thread activity logged in realtime.
posted by CaseyB at 1:23 PM on March 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

Computer, load up celery man, please
posted by kaelynski at 1:59 PM on March 9, 2020 [5 favorites]

SyncToy was the best. I’ve replaced it with BeyondCompare, which costs money, of course, but it’s multi-platform and is money well spent.
posted by lhauser at 6:31 PM on March 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Hot dog stand theme plz
posted by benzenedream at 6:23 PM on March 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Utilities is my favorite software category. They genuinely make me very happy.

I am badass with them too. Like procmon lets me do things like report a bug to a compiler vendor saying "Your linker has a race condition when used with Visual Studio. In some environments this can occasionally cause it to fail. Here is exactly what it is doing, exactly what Visual Studio is doing, and two different ways that you could fix the problem."
posted by aubilenon at 1:23 PM on March 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Definitely loved these utils: procex/procmon have been very useful but I also like Process Hacker 2 for its cleanliness.

For some truly ridiculous regexing of filenames I use Bulk Rename Utility.

And I forget the name of the program I use to get into dll's ... dll hex or something?

But the two things I can't work without anymore are Fences (create (scrollable) little zones to stuff your desktop icons in, for organisational purposes) and Xplorer2, a multipane Explorer replacement. SOOOO worth the money I paid :)
posted by MacD at 3:25 AM on March 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

I love Fences. I like to have things on my desktop but a disorganized clutter drives me nuts—so that utility was right up my alley.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:27 AM on March 16, 2020 [2 favorites]