PowerToys gets a lot of attention for its big-ticket features. Some of them are so useful that they’ve even made popular third-party Windows apps redundant. But those headline features also tend to overshadow a bunch of smaller, single-purpose tools that are just as handy. I’ve been using a lot of them for a while, and I’d seriously miss them if they disappeared tomorrow.

Awake

Stop Windows from sleeping mid-task

Windows lets you manage the screen and sleep timeout from the Settings app, but sometimes, you might just want to keep your PC awake for a few hours while a large download or file transfer finishes. For such one-time thing, changing the screen and sleep settings sounds like overkill.

PowerToys has a feature called Awake that can keep your PC awake without changing any of your power plan settings. You can trigger the Awake tool directly from the System Tray, and it gives you a few options: keep the screen awake indefinitely or set a timer. It can even turn the screen off while keeping the machine running underneath, which is what most people need.

Grab And Move

Move and resize windows without losing your mind

I’m not sure if you’ve realized this, but moving windows on Windows is slightly more annoying than it needs to be. You have to aim for the title bar, which isn’t always easy with apps that have a tab-style interface. Resizing is even worse because you have to look for the thin edge or corner.

PowerToys’ Grab And Move utility makes both things ridiculously easy. It lets you left-click drag anywhere inside a window to move it, while right-clicking and dragging lets you resize it from the nearest edge or corner. To trigger it, you simply have to hold down the Alt key while performing either action.

Crop And Lock

Picture-in-picture for any app

Crop And Lock lets you select a portion of any app and pop it out into a smaller, always-on-top window. This is useful if you don’t have a large screen or multi-monitor setup. For instance, if you’re only tracking the download progress bar in Steam or watching the upload progress in OneDrive, there’s no reason to keep the entire app in front. The cropped bit just floats there while you do other things.

This gives you a couple of useful modes. The Thumbnail mode creates a non-interactive preview of the cropped area, while Reparent actually crops the window itself, so the elements inside remain fully interactive. There’s also a Screenshot mode, but it’s less useful as it doesn’t update the content. It’s only good enough for referencing something.

Light Switch

Automatic theme switching is what Windows is missing

Windows has had light and dark mode for years, but what’s been missing is a way to switch between them automatically. It’s a simple thing, but if you want it, your options are either changing the mode manually or downloading a third-party app just for this purpose. Neither seems great.

Light Switch is PowerToys utility that fixes that. It lets you switch between light and dark themes based on the time of the day. You can either switch themes based on local sunset and sunrise times or on your fixed schedule. What I like the most about this tool is that it also enables the Win + Ctrl + Shift + D shortcut that lets you switch between modes any time without actually opening the Settings app.

Shortcut Guide

A cheat sheet for every keyboard shortcut

I don’t know about you, but I love using keyboard shortcuts whenever I can. The only problem is that I have a terrible memory, so remembering dozens of shortcuts across every app I use is a pain. The Shortcut Guide helps me with that.

All you need to do is press Windows + Shift + / and it opens an overlay showing all the supported keyboard shortcuts for the app you’re using. You can then refer to the list and try a few shortcuts. Besides apps, it even shows keyboard shortcuts for Windows too, so you can learn those too. I personally find this especially handy when learning a new app.

Peek

Preview anything without opening it

Peek is a macOS-inspired tool that brings spacebar previews to your Windows PC. Select any file, hit the spacebar key, and PowerToys opens it. It works with all kinds of file types, including images, videos, Office documents, PDFs, Markdown files, and more. The biggest benefit is that you don’t have to wait for the app to load and then show your file. It also lets you scroll between files in the current folder using arrow keys, which is handy when you’re trying to find something in a folder full of similarly named files.

You don’t even have to close it manually when you’re done previewing the file. As soon as you switch to something else, the Peek window closes automatically.