Posts Tagged With ‘powertoys&8217


Power toys I cannot work without

Jan 30, 2021

I believe every skilled worker needs to have a collection of good quality tools to achieve optimal productivity. For me, a big part of my job is to write code for software development as well as for algorithmic development, testing, debugging, and frequently for learning. As such, I have collected a number of invaluable tools for myself. In this post I am going to share the tools I use for my work.


Microsoft Power Toys

Jan 30, 2021

Microsoft powertoys is about about two years old and I have been using it for few months only. It is not a single tool but a collection of different tools and it is very actively maintained and developed on GitHub. If contains the following tools:

The tool I use most among these is Powertoys Run. Infact, I came across Microsoft PowerToys because I was looking for a replacement for Launchy which I have been using for more than a decade but it is not longer actively maintained. I have blogged about the transition here. The idea behind Launchy/Powertoys Run is simple. Press a keyboard shortcut (Alt+Space), and it pop a single floating text control, already focused to accept the input and you can type in a name of the program you want to run or a file or folder you are looking for. Powertoys Run can located any executable indexed by Windows search. So, if you maintain a folder of portable tools like I do, simply make sure that the folder is in Windows Search Index. It is a major productivity booster for me.

Power Toys Run

Other than Powertoys run, I use keyboard manager to remap some keys on my laptop to make them more suitable for programming/text editing. Previously, I used to use SharpKeys but now I exclusively use keyboard manager.

I have not actively used other tools but color picker looks good and in future I might replace Just Color Picker with it.