PowerToys is a collection of system utilities by Microsoft for the power users to optimise their workflow on Windows for greater productivity. It was first released for Windows 95 and was quite popular with the users.
Now Microsoft is bringing back PowerToys to the Windows 10 as an open-source application. You can check out its source code on GitHub.
At present PowerToys for Windows 10 is still in preview stage and has seven different utilities available. Few of which are ‘PowerToys Run’ a Mac OS like application launcher, ‘PowerRename’ a bulk file renaming tool and ‘FancyZones’ a Window layout tool.
In this article, we will look at how to install PowerToys on Windows 10. Before we begin, note that you need Windows 10 1803 (build 17134) or later update to run PowerToys.
Install PowerToys via Winget
Winget is a new package manager for Windows 10 which makes installing applications super easy with a single command. If you don’t have winget installed, check out our guide on how to install winget package manager.
PowerToys is available in the winget repository, so to install it open the Command Prompt or PowerShell and run:
winget install powertoys
Winget will automatically download and install the PowerToys. But you may get a UAC prompt asking for permission to make changes, press the ‘Yes’ button to continue with the installation in that case.
Download and Install PowerToys Manually
If you’re not a command line person and you certainly don’t know anything about using winget, you may want to head over to the PowerToys GitHub releases page and download the latest available version manually from there.
Look for the ‘Latest release’ label to find the latest version of PowerToys on Github, and then click on the PowerToysSetup-*.msi under the assets section of that particular release to download and save the installer on your computer.
After the download finishes, go to the folder where you saved the file and double-click on PowerToysSetup-*.msi file to run the installer.
Follow the onscreen instructions in PowerToys setup dialog and complete the installation.
Once installed, run PowerToys from the Start menu. It should be available in the ‘Recently added’ section at the top of the Start screen. In case it isn’t, search for ‘PowerToys’ in the Start menu and you will find it.
The PowerToys will run as a background application when you start it. If your PC doesn’t meet all the requirements, PowerToys will ask your permission to install the desktop runtime package (in case it didn’t do it at the time of installation).
The PowerToys settings window can be accessed through the system tray in Windows 10 taskbar.
PowerToys is actively being worked on by Microsoft and many independent contributors. Microsoft plans to add more features and utilities in the future releases. The first stable release of PowerToys is speculated to be released in September 2020.
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