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PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

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Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#161

Post by majkinetor »

coderintherye wrote: post #135

Since I so rarely see a Windows thread, perhaps folks wont mind me asking: What utilities or code would you leverage if you had a use case to run a program on a Windows machine once a day and look for any CSV/XLS/XLSX files and then copy those to another server? (With full knowledge of the owner of said computer, they are just lacking in proficiency to do anything even as simple as connect Box Sync)

There are number of alternatives.

1. Just powershell in a loop working as a service 2. Task Scheduler 3. Rundeck 4. Pode

WinScp is awesome for linux, and you can use simple PowerShell remoting for windows.

Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#162

Post by dr_kiszonka »

anilakar wrote: post #150
tveyben wrote: post #48

I like powertoys, especially ‘fancy zones’! But Explorer is something I stopped using more than a decade ago when I encountered TotalCommander - that I cannot do without!!! The regex-supporting live-preview batch-filenaming utility alone is awesome. I work so much faster (with the keyboard) than will ever possible in Explorer! I could write for hours about the greatness of TCM, but as that’s a little off topic here I…

FanzyZones is absolutely essential if you're using large monitors.

I use FancyZones as well but I get annoyed that it doesn't seem to preserve custom layouts between reboots. I have to switch to my layouts manually after every reboot. Have you experienced it too? I am curious about whether it is something on my end or not.

Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#163

Post by na85 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #58
na85 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Fancy features are awesome for "normies". iPhones have a feature where you can create PDFs page by page, using the camera as a scanner. After you snap the photo it offers you a crop and transform tool, and does a little image recognition to assist you and make the edges of the crop tool snap to the page within the photo. I've found that feature immensely useful in a professional context and (it was a compan…

Wouldn't it make more sense for the scanning feature to be its own app, so that users can find it, know what it is, and not activate it accidentally?

> Wouldn't it make more sense for the scanning feature to be its own app, so that users can find it, know what it is, and not activate it accidentally?

It's been a few years since I had that phone so the details are a bit fuzzy but I seem to recall it was very discoverable from the email attachment interface, at the very least.

Problem with a separate app is that it's a separate codebase and thus easier for it to fall to neglect.

Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#164

Post by NelsonMinar »

PowerToys Run is fantastic as an app launcher. Not quite as good as Alfred on MacOS but then nothing is. There's a bunch of similar apps for Windows (I used to use Hain) but none ever worked quite right for me, PowerToys Run does though.

FancyZones is awfully nice too for just putting a window somewhere at a reasonable size and location.

As other folks have noted SysInternals is another similar rogue Windows product by Microsoft. Process Explorer from there is indispensible, as is Autoruns.

Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#166

Post by dorfsmay »

bityard wrote: post #97
dorfsmay wrote: post #94

I remember when PowerToy was the only to get focus-follow-mouse, before you could do that in the registry. This was magic! It made Windows half usable. These days, when IT spends so much effort to make working difficult, and castrate Windows to the the point it is unusable, I work on Mac if my customer won't allow Linux, and that has to be one of the most frustrating thing on macOS, you have to click to bring anythin…

It looks like your text-to-speech doesn't work very well either

It wasn't text-to-speech, but me typing too fast helped by Android auto-incorrect.

Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#167

Post by adam_arthur »

bladegash wrote: post #151
adam_arthur wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get "native" linux on Windows with WSL. It's a linux container, but with nice integrations out of the box re: networking etc. I'm not against running linux alone per se, but to me being able to run both Windows (with better app support, polish), and Linux at the same time is kind of the best of both worlds. Windows feels nicer as a daily driver, and can do all dev work directly in a linux environment

I am a big fan of WSL and used it extensively for a while across multiple development environments. Also like using Windows a lot and feel more productive on it than Unix based systems. However, I started to run into a lot of issues with the file systems being a bit too commingled though, especially when using things like VSCode’s WSL integrations where you’re regularly reading/writing to the Linux file system from W…

Hmm was this for WSL v1? The previous implementation had pretty bad filesystem performance, but I haven't had any issues with WSL2. I host an app where I write gigs of data to disk every day without any perf issues.

But WSL1 would've been super slow for the same use case

Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#168

Post by di4na »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #162
anilakar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FanzyZones is absolutely essential if you're using large monitors.

I use FancyZones as well but I get annoyed that it doesn't seem to preserve custom layouts between reboots. I have to switch to my layouts manually after every reboot. Have you experienced it too? I am curious about whether it is something on my end or not.

It has a setting to remember. If it does not it means you have a problem with display detections

Re: PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

#170

Post by fassssst »

bschne wrote: post #115

These are great, but with some of them I cannot help but wonder why MSFT would choose not to include them in the OS by default. They seem fairly unobtrusive and like they wouldn't add too much complexity to the product in return for what you get in terms of better usability and/or additional functionality. Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software produc…

Fancy Zones was an inspiration for Windows 11’s Snap Layout feature, which is a bit simplified but provides many of the same benefits.
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