PowerToys: Complete Guide and Key Details

Microsoft recently held an online community meetup on YouTube to discuss various improvements expected to be rolled out to the company's development tools in the near future, such as Dev Drive, Dev Home, WSL, etc. During the talk, Microsoft also showed off a very interesting new utility that will soon be added to PowerToys. This widget is called Workspaces and will be available in the next PowerToys update, version 0.84.

Although the main focus of the presentation was on developers, Microsoft also emphasized the benefits that regular users will receive when using this new utility. Especially those who want to save time and clicks on repetitive tasks will appreciate this new utility.

In short, PowerToys Workspaces (called App Layouts in the Windows Dev Chat demo) allows you to create groups of applications, arrange them on the screen in a certain order, add some additional arguments or commands, then create a shortcut to launch all of those apps.

For example, with just one click, you can launch Visual Studio on the left side of the screen, Terminal in the upper right corner, and Microsoft Edge in the lower right corner of the screen. You will be able to create multiple workspaces and keep them on the screen for quick access. Here's a demo of how this feature works:

PowerToys Workspaces will allow you to capture existing layouts with running applications, applications on various screens, and even minimized applications. Furthermore, you will be able to add CLI arguments, launch the application as Admin, specify window size, state, and many other options.

There's no word yet on exactly when PowerToys Workspaces will be available, but considering the app receives updates fairly regularly, the wait shouldn't be too long. As usual, PowerToys 0.84 will also bring improvements to existing modules and utilities.