Tuesday, May 14, 2019

PowerToys coming back as opensource with Windows 10 support

If you are one of those who have used Windows 95, then you must be familiar with the very popular PowerToys set of tools. The PowerToys project was originally launched for Windows 95. It had a set of very useful utilities to make Windows 95 ‘s user work efficiently. Most famous was TweakUI, which would tweak Windows 95 with an easy interface instead of digging into Registry. Many Windows 95 users had the opinion that what PowerToys had brought should have been in Windows 95 to begin with. With a size of just 205 KB to download and with over a dozen enhancements, it was very popular.
Inspired by Windows 95 era PowerToys project, these are being brought again as opensource and with Windows 10 support. So this reboot will provide Windows 10 power users with ways to squeeze more efficiency out of Windows 10 shell and customize it.
The first preview of these utilities and corresponding source code will be released in Summer 2019.
Now as an opensource, 2 utilities are being worked out first:
  • Maximize to new desktop widget - The MTND widget shows a pop-up button when a user hovers over the maximize / restore button on any window. Clicking it creates a new desktop, sends the app to that desktop and maximizes the app on the new desktop.
  • Windows key shortcut guide - The shortcut guide appears when a user holds the Windows key down for more than one second and shows the available shortcuts for the current state of the desktop.
This opensource project welcomes contributions and suggestions.
For more details, please check GitHub

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