Users of Windows 95 and Windows XP may fondly remember PowerToys which was a collection of tools for Windows that add useful little features to the OS, like “command prompt here”, “Quick res” and Sens to X. They were handy but over time many of the features made their way into the OS and PowerToys disappeared.

PowerToys are back as Microsoft have brought them back as an open source project and the first preview is now available. The first version has a tool that shows you Windows shortcuts when you hold down the Windows key. Very handy if you can’t remember the shortcut key.

The other tool called FancyZones and lets you setup custom locations for dragging windows into.

Fancy Zones is a window manager that is designed to make it easy to arrange and snap windows into efficient layouts for your workflow and also to restore these layouts quickly. Fancy Zones allows the user to define a set of window locations for a desktop that are drag targets for windows. When the user drags a window into a zone, the windows is resized and repositioned to fill that zone.

You can get the download from Github.

Leave a Reply