Robert Irvine recommends new programs that won’t cost you a thing
SYSTEM TOOL
Microsoft PowerToys 0.76
www.snipca.com/48576
What you need: Windows 10 or 11
Microsoft has regularly updated PowerToys in 2023, though it has – perhaps thankfully – resisted the temptation to add its Copilot AI assistant to the system-utility suite. PowerToys 0.76 rounds off the year with a raft of improvements and useful new options, across its ever-expanding range of tools.
Several of these have been redesigned to give them a more ‘modern look’, including PowerToys Run and the floating toolbars for the Quick Accent and Text Extractor tools. Quick Accent, which lets you type accented characters for different languages, now supports Finnish, Greek and Welsh, as well as numerical fractions. Curiously, Text Extractor, which uses OCR to copy text from images, is now disabled by default in Windows 11 and advises you to use Snipping Tool’s new OCR function instead.
PowerToys has improved its File Explorer add-ons to provide faster and higher-quality previews of files when you select them and press Alt+P. One new add-on lets you preview images in the QOI (Quite OK Image) lossless-compression format, which is being used by many web developers as an alternative to PNG.
The Peek tool, which lets you preview files full-size without opening them, has also been enhanced. When you display a video in a Peek window, by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+Space, you can now press the spacebar to pause and resume playback. Pressing Ctrl+W will instantly close the preview window.
The Keyboard Manager tool now lets you remap keys and shortcuts to insert short sequences of Unicode text. Although this will be of most use to programmers, it will also prove handy for quickly typing special characters and applying formatting – Wikipedia has a list of Unicode characters at www.snipca.com/48579.
Another notable change is that when you click a tool’s name in the PowerToys Dashboard, it will open the relevant page so you can tweak its settings.
1 Introduced in PowerToys 0.75, the Dashboard tab provides a useful overview of the utility suite’s many modules, and lets you easily switch them on or off. Click a tool’s name to open its page of additional settings.
2 Speed up your typing by using Keyboard Manager to remap seldom-used keys and keyboard shortcuts. This lets you quickly apply special characters and formatting and – in version 0.76 – insert Unicode text.
