The topic PowerToys is Microsoft’s test lab for the Windows features you actually want… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Over the years, there have been plenty of features requested for Microsoft to add to Windows. Sometimes, the company listens, like how it brought back taskbar ungrouping on Windows 11 after the initial release removed it, or how it added a package manager to Windows 10 with Winget. But most of the time, it feels like the company takes ages to catch up with popular requests.
And lately, it looks like Microsoft is relying on a separate tool, PowerToys, as a testing ground for all the features users actually to see in Windows. I’d go as far as to say PowerToys is indispensable if you have a Windows PC, and sometimes, some of the great features in it eventually get built into Windows in some capacity.
I can’t claim with total confidence that these two are entirely related, but you could definitely argue that the inclusion of FancyZones in PowerToys has some connection to Windows 11’s Snap Layouts feature. FancyZones was part of the “initial” release of PowerToys for Windows 10 back in 2019, and it’s hard not to see how it might have inspired Windows 11 when it debuted two years later.
Snap Layouts was one of the headlining features of Windows 11, and while it doesn’t have flexibility and ease of use of FancyZones (which is still available in PowerToys today), it does bring some of that idea straight into the operating system. Now, you can snap apps side by side using all kinds of suggested layouts, not just a basic split into quadrants like Windows 10 had. Plus, you can choose the layout you want to start setting up right from the beginning, either by dragging a window to the top of the screen or hovering the mouse over the Restore button.
I still wish it was more like FancyZones, but Snap Layouts was a marked improvement from Windows 10’s window management.
With FancyZones, I got more layout options and better multitasking support than Snap Assist ever offered.
Now, this one isn’t part of PowerToys anymore, but for a while there, it was one of the best parts of it, and I’m still upset it was removed. Video Conference Mute was a tool that easily let you disable your camera or microphone (or both) using a quick keyboard shortcut, so no matter what video calling software you used, you could always control your camera without remembering different hotkeys or the locations of certain buttons.
As you can probably guess, this was a pretty big deal during the remote work mandates that happened in 2020 and 2021, but the need for something like this became so big that Microsoft built a mute button right into the taskbar some time later, along with a keyboard shortcut, Windows + Alt + K. However, this only worked with certain “supported apps”, which, as far as I can tell, only ever included Microsoft Teams.
Despite that, as remote work became less of a requirement, Microsoft eventually removed Video Conference Mute from PowerToys, which is unfortunate since the native integration is far less useful.
So many ways to connect those good cameras to your PC reliably.
Now here we have one where PowerToys was clearly the starting point, but the native Windows equivalent is actually a good bit better. Text Extractor was a PowerToys utility added with version 0.62, all the way back in September 2022, and it worked sort of similarly to the Snipping Tool, where you can select any area of your screen too capture its content. But instead of just grabbing an image, Text Extractor copied the text in that area to your clipboard using optical character recognition (OCR).
One year later, Microsoft started rolling out an update for the built-in Snipping Tool on Windows 11 that added this feature for Windows Insiders, though it was made a lot better here. Instead of automatically copying the text, Snipping Tool simply highlights it, allowing you to select the portions you want to copy, while also giving you the ability to redact text. This meant that not only can you manipulate the text itself, but you can easily modify the original image to black out any sensitive information like phone numbers or email addresses. Later on, Microsoft even added an auto-redaction feature that detects this kind of information and automatically hides it in the image.
The implementation of this feature in Snipping Tool made it even more ubiquitous, and it was so good that PowerToys itself now recommends using that instead. It’s one of the best examples of PowerToys being the breeding ground for a fantastic Windows feature.
The most recent example of PowerToys eventually bringing its benefits to Windows itself has to be the recent update to the Run dialog in Insiders builds of Windows. In Microsoft’s words, the new Run dialog (opened with Windows + R) is now powered by the same logic that Command Palette uses, so it loads even faster, at 94ms version 103ms before. Plus, it has a more modernized look and feel, too.
Granted, the speed is far from encompassing everything that makes Command Palette great, but it’s something. And it’s still a great example of PowerToys bleeding over to Windows 11 to make it better.
The above are great examples of how Windows 11 has borrowed features from PowerToys to massively improve itself, but they’re also just the tip of the iceberg of how much better Windows could get. PowerToys still has a ton of features that I consider essential for Windows users, but there aren’t many signs of most of them coming over to the OS itself.
FancyZones may have already influenced window management on Windows 11, but frankly, it could be so much better. I use this tool on any computer I use, whether it’s Windows, macOS, or Linux, and it should be built into the system. In fact, the KDE Plasma desktop for Linux has a feature like this that’s much closer to what I think should be included in Windows 11.
Then there are recent additions like Power Display for managing external monitor brightness, or Light Switch for automatically switching between light and dark themes at specific times of the day. Command Palette as a whole could probably be brought to Windows 11, too, as could some of the benefits of PowerRename or Image Resizer. There are so many things Windows could still take from PowerToys to become the ultimate version of itself.
I don’t expect Microsoft to actually build every PowerToys tool into Windows 11, nor would it make sense to do so considering some of these features have fairly niche use cases. But with how trigger-happy the company is to include more preinstalled junk apps, I’m surprised PowerToys just hasn’t been added to that list. It’s more useful that 90% of the apps you get with Windows 11, frankly, and you could still uninstall it if you wanted. I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed.