Hi i'm clint ruckus i'm the lead for power toys and i'm here to tell you all about it
So you might ask yourself what is power toys and why is it relevant to me
Well power toys is a installable suite of utilities that's built in collaboration with the community in open source
It helps customize features in windows 10 and add in additional utilities to make you
and your uh workflow more optimal
an example of a few of these
Power toys utilities are a color picker a window management system
We call fancy zones and we have six additional utilities. Also. I'd love to talk to you about in a couple minutes
So, what is the origin story to power toys well way back in the day with windows 95 and windows xp
There's a group of utilities that were built by microsoft engineers
To make their lives easier and they said hey, this was a really cool group of utilities and they made them available to everyone
fast forward to windows 10
A bunch of people came and internally were like, hey, this would be a really great utility
wouldn't it be nice if we could make it public to everyone and we decided to
Make it open source and show the community how we're building out these utilities to help make their lives better
So, how do you install and try power checkpoints? Well, it's extremely easy
All you need to do is go to aka dot ms. Slash install power toys and that will bring you to the release tab in
our github repository
If you just go to the front page of github you'll be greeted to this screen that you see right here
You just click the top release candidate
And you go down to our exe file here in assets. Click it and download it to your local computer
Here i'm saving it to my desktop. So it'll take a second to download
I'm going to double click it and then you'll see the install wizard come up
Click next a few times and then power toys will auto start
once the installer finishes up
I'm going to click finish
And
I'm going to go and say no. I don't need to restart explorer and here you can see power choice is now fully started
I'm going to double click on the settings and you can see it's operational
So, let's quickly run through all our power toys
So
Here you can see the settings screen. So let's go quickly launch the color picker to do color picker
the default keystroke is shift window c and here you can see it come up and you can see the color of
The different colors underneath so let's say I want this black just click it i'm going to go pull up notepad really quick
And i'm going to paste it and you can see here it gave me a hex value if I go back and grab this blue
Same thing it's that exact color. But now let's say that that cut that doesn't work for you. Let's grab an rgb value
And let's grab one of these blues from the ocean
Click it and it gives you the rgb value super easy super quick and it's fully customizable to what keystroke works best for you
So let's talk about fancy zones our quick window layout management system
So first, we're going to launch our editor to show which zones we currently want for my computer
I have a priority grid with five zones built into it if I wanted to I could set a column grid of three
a grid of six
Whatever you want. You can also create fully customizable layouts also, but for me, I
Like using a priority grid of five i'm gonna click apply. And also I have a couple settings here that are
Not default that work best for me and that's overriding arrow snap
I like it when my windows resize when they're unsnapped and I also enjoy
Having my windows be transparent when I drag them
So to use fancy zones, all you need to do is hold down
Shift, so let's go open up an instance of terminal in the instance of notepad
And i'm going to hold down shift and I click the title bar and here you can see
It kick in
So all i'm doing is just holding shift and dragging around in my window. I'm gonna put notepad in zone two
And then for terminal let's bring terminal into
Zones, three and five so here i'm holding down shift and i'm going in between the break
Now wouldn't it be great if also you can make them any size you want?
So here i'm going to hold down shift control and drag the title bar
And i'm going to go
grab zones one two and three
And it's that simple just by holding down control and shift
And that's fancy zones
Up next is
file explorer editions
So here we have the power of power toy folder and you can see we have markdown svg
Files html files here, and I also have my preview pane open
so if you've never used the preview pane built into file explorer just click view and click preview pane and this
Uh pane will open up
so if I select a
Test.html you can see right here an html file fully renders
well, there are two file formats that developers are using more and more svg and markdown and they aren't actually
Uh more preview pane capable. So guys, we've enabled that so if I click markdown,
You can see here's the full markdown file for the roadmap for power toys
Also same thing with this svg
So I have the svg open here and as you can see we also have a thumbnail in file explorer, let me be
Now this is something that didn't exist before you weren't able to see the thumbnail of the svg
So we've added this ability i'm going to change the color from green to red really quick and hit save
You can see in real time. We've updated the thumbnail and the svg as well
Next we have
Image resizer image resizer does just what it sounds like it resizes images and allows you to do bulk image resizing
So quickly i'm going to hit
Shift window s to do a screen capture here. I'm just going to grab my screen
Because I have focus mode on i'm going to go grab this
Screenshot really quick and save it to my desktop
I'm going to drag it into everyone's favorite power toys folder i'm going to right click on this file and you can see right here
It says resize pictures
So i'm going to go and make it a small image and resize it
And right here you can see the screenshot says small and in my uh in the about you can see it says
A height of 480 versus the actual screenshot was a height of 705
So let's just open it up really quick and you can definitely tell the difference between the two images
Next is keyboard manager keyboard manager is a powerful remapping tool to let you do key to key
key to shortcut
Shortcut the shortcut and shortcut the key remappings now you might ask. Why do you need this?
Um, but there's instances where you might be used to different keyboards. You can't your
Native language is a different language and different languages have different keyboards
So you want your muscle memory to work exactly how it's used to?
So i'm going to show you a very trivial example of remapping keys and then i'm going to show you
A really powerful way to use the shortcut remapping to make your life more powerful in
An application for instance. So here i'm going to go remap
key a
To key b
I'm going to click ok
So i'm hitting a
and i'm getting b
But if you don't believe me, let's go start up our on key on screen keyboard
and i'm going to go tip a
And b and you can see it's fully remapped
So let's delete that
key binding
And we go back
To my keyboard i'm going to click a again. Oops
And now you can see it fully remapped the key
So let's talk about remapping shortcuts and where this might become very very powerful. So i'm going to go remap
Control f which most people would say would be finding something and
Randomly, i'm just going to type f4 and this is going to make more sense. As soon as I include everyone's favorite email client outlook
So I have this email from matt
And I really am interested in finding some text here
Because he has a word that I really like and it's promotion. So i'm going to hit ctrl f
and the find and replace
Uh prompt comes up. So if I type in pro
It's going to find promotion
Now let's delete this key remap
And if I hit ctrl f now it actually forwards the email
This is one of those shortcuts where I always use ctrl f to find but outlook does things slightly differently
So I want to be able to override that capability and keyboard manager allows you to do that
Next is
Power rename power rename is a bulk renaming tool
So you can use regular expressions or just something basic like a single word?
So let's go back to our power toys folder here and i'm going to highlight all these roadmap copies
Because some person decided to copy a bunch of files and make copies of copies and copies versus using proper source code management
So here i'm going to go right click on these and go to power rename
And i'm going to search for the word copy and you can see in real time the renaming here i'm just going to click rename
And it's going to rename all my files on my file
System now we're going to talk about power toys run. It's a quick launcher that has additional capabilities without sacrificing performance
Here you can
Remap what the key shortcut is along with show more and less uh results
And do a couple other additional options for me. I like using window key space. So let's go remap that
so if I hit window key space you can see
Power toys, uh run come up here
I'm, just going to type term and terminal comes up exactly what you expect the type code visual studio code. You can do things like
Run it as an administrator
Open up the containing folder or even open up the path
in console
So if I click that or hit enter you'll see
visual studio code run
Or terminal for instance and terminal will open up. It's extremely quick extremely fast extremely intuitive
finally
We have shortcut guide now. You might be asking yourself. I'm a power user
Why do I need a shortcut guide? Well i'm willing to bet there's probably a couple shortcuts. You may not know of
So our team came up with a list of shortcuts right now
That we thought were very very relevant. So if you hold down
Window key you'll get this dialog that comes up and it shows you
different
Options you could do for the current context
So if I hit window key 2 outlook would open if I hit window key left that window would snap to the left
or a new one I learned was window key comma
Temporarily lets you peek at your desktop. So there's always new things that you can learn and become that much more of a power user
there's occasionally times where you're
Going to use applications that need to be run as admin so
This is a scenario. I want to directly call out because there are three instances in power toys where we use
system hooks that uh, cause
That needs need to be running at the same level as the other applications that are using this namely administrator. So
You can see on my screen here. I have windows terminal
up and that's running as administrator and
To be able to use fancy zones with this fancy zones also needs to be run as administrator
So to do that
All you need to do is restart power toys as administrator
Now if power toys notices any application that is running higher level than what it is
It will inform you as a user through a system notification
But i'm just going to show this to you really quick as uh running it elevated. So I just click
run as admin I click the
user
Prompt and here you can see now i'm running as administrator if I always want to run it as administrator
You can click the box. It's not something we suggest doing though
so
Now if I hold down shift and move my terminal window around
You can see everything starts working again
So what does it mean that power toys is open source, well, it means that everything we do
It's under the mit license and it's done in the open
So if you want to clone or fork a repository
You're more than welcome to we also accept pull requests from you the community, which means you can contribute back
so
Here is a repository. All you need to do to get started is copy our url go to visual studio and clone the repository
You click clone and visual studio will grab everything you need
Now there are a few dependencies if you were to do this and you just go down to our developer documents down here
Where it says developer guidance you click there and it will tell you exactly how to set up your computer
and the rules and the contribution guidelines to
contribute back to power toys
There are many different ways. You can actually contribute back to power toys. You can file a feature request help out with design
File bugs if you find any you can help out with documentation
And heck help out with spelling because gosh knows I need it
And you can also help out with actual active development of new features
So if you're interested in what powertoys is currently working on you can check out our project tab
That will show you month over month. What product what issues and features we're proactively thinking about in addition
We're right now thinking about our 2021 roadmap and what new features and enhancements we're going to add into power toys
So tabs versus spaces
my opinion is do what works best for that language along with what your team's
Guidelines are so a great example of what works best for a language is yaml yaml space based?
So you kind of have to use it. It's not something to pick a fight on now if you really want to troll someone
Now and your name was rich turner on who's on my team when we're testing out keyboard manager
We may have put tab and space and reverse the order on him
Thanks for spending some time with me today to learn about power toys if you'd like a deeper dive overview on any of our
Utilities, please
Check out our wiki and if you want to contribute
please go to the github repository page if you want to follow me on twitter my
My username is at clint ruckus
If you like tabs versus spaces
Please hit the subscribe button and up next will be the gpu acceleration video with clark