Microsoft just dropped the PowerToys 0.95 update, code-named “Eclipse.” and it’s absolutely packed with quality-of-life improvements and performance boosts. This release addresses a ton of long-standing community requests.
This new update brings a few new things, but my favorite is probably the new Light Switch utility. This brand-new utility automatically switches your PC between light and dark mode. You can either set custom start and end times, or you can just let Light Switch do the work for you by using the sunrise and sunset times for your location. If you want to tweak it a bit, you can adjust the offset so it starts a little earlier or later. It even lets you choose whether the shell, apps, or both should switch.
If you’re a quick-action person, there’s a keyboard shortcut you can configure to toggle it on the fly. If you’ve never used something like this, I highly recommend it. Using night mode on your devices before bed is much better than trying to sleep after using bright lights.
The Command Palette also got a huge upgrade with its speed. Power Tools Command Palette was a bit slow, but this release brings a brand-new fuzzy matcher with smarter fallbacks that makes search results both faster and more relevant.
To give you an idea of how much faster it is, the dev team provided some real-world numbers. Searching for “access” dropped from 633ms to 113ms. Searching for “copilot” went from 257ms to a blazing 78ms. Finally, the search time for “4*4” went from 124ms down to just 3ms. Those are some major upgrades.
Under the hood, the team limited app results in the All Apps extension to a default of 10 (which is configurable), fixed an issue where the Command Palette was throwing a lot of exceptions during searches, and added logic to cancel previous searches when you type something new. Beyond speed, they also polished up the experience with a new gallery/grid view for search results and an option to toggle animations on or off.
Another big feature is that you can now open Peek simply by pressing the Space bar. No more custom shortcut required, and it’s the new default behavior going forward. That is a small but steady improvement that is going to make the Peek utility much faster to use.
According to Microsoft, the Find My Mouse utility got a lot of requests from the community, and the team worked on it so it now supports transparency. You can make the highlight fully transparent by heading to the Appearance section and adjusting the transparency slider for the cursor color. This is great for when you want a subtler effect but still need the utility.
If you’ve run into shortcut conflicts, the Settings menu has been improved. The last release brought shortcut conflict detection, and now you can ignore specific conflicts directly from the dialog, so they stop popping up. Also, you can now completely unassign shortcuts for any utilities you don’t use by using the Clear button in the configuration dialog. That makes it easy to remove shortcuts for any utilities you don’t use.
A few other notable changes include Mouse Pointer Crosshairs that show only the horizontal line, vertical line, or both, and Gliding Cursor, which can now be canceled with the Esc key. Also, ZoomIt now supports smooth image zooming.
Microsoft stated that it is not done speeding things up, and that users can expect more performance improvements across additional features in the coming months. The company is planning a revamped Keyboard Manager UI, custom endpoint, and local model support for Advanced Paste, more Command Palette improvements, and a brand-new Shortcut Guide experience. However, for now, you can just enjoy this new update to PowerToys.
You can download the update now, and if you don’t have PowerToys already, it’s available from the Microsoft Store or GitHub repository.
Source: Microsoft Dev Blog