Microsoft’s PowerToys includes a ton of useful, and these five make it a must-have app for me — and probably for you, too.
Windows 11 is one of my favorite versions of Windows ever, and it brought with it many improvements. Design was a big focus, and Windows 11 does indeed look beautiful, but there are also productivity improvements like Snap Layouts, and more recently, tabs for File Explorer and Notepad. But while Windows has always been great for productivity, it’s not perfect, and that’s where PowerToys comes in.
Long-time Windows users probably remember PowerToys as a set of tools aimed at power users that dates all way back to the late 90s. Many of them greatly increased the speed of specific common tasks that many users complete regularly. PowerToys was dormant for a long time, but in 2019, Microsoft rebooted the concept with new tools and community-backed development. This meant that not only was Microsoft creating new tools, but users were creating and helping to refine these tools, too, bringing even more value to the table. The PowerToys we have today is far more capable than the version released in 2019, and it keeps expanding.
Today, there are nearly 20 tools built into the software. While they’re all useful in some way, there are a few that stand out for one reason or another. I use many of these tools frequently, and they make life so much easier. Some of these ought to be built right into Windows itself, but for now, let’s take a closer look at what I’d consider the best PowerToys features.
FancyZones skyrocketed to the top of this list because I’ve started using an ultrawide monitor. But anyone with a high-end monitor or a complex multi-monitor setup could really benefit from using FancyZones. In fact, it’s one of my personal most wanted features for Windows 12.
You can think of FancyZones like Snap Layouts on lots of steroids. It gives you a handful of preset layouts that you can use to re-organize the windows on your screen, splitting the screen in the way that’s most convenient to you. But the real power of FancyZones is in its customizability. You can create and edit your own layouts with as many zones as you want. So if you want to have six apps (or even more) on screen at once, you can do that, and you can keep them all organized easily. My most common use (seen above) is actually very simplistic, but you can go so much further.
More than that, FancyZones makes it extremely easy to slot apps into the layout. Simply hold Shift on your keyboard while dragging a window, and as soon as it’s inside the zone you want, you can release it, so it’s properly resized. No need to drag windows to the edge of the screen and move them around to put them in the right place like with Snap Layouts. You can even switch between FancyZones layouts with keyboard shortcuts to help you adapt to the changes.
FancyZones is such a huge upgrade over the traditional window management in Windows 11 that I can’t fathom why it shouldn’t just be built into the OS.
