Steve Fenton

A glance at PowerToys and WinGet

PowerToys and WinGet are exciting previews for Windows Users. If you are a civilian, you’ll be getting these in general release soon, but for technical folks might want to try things out early. Or now!

PowerToys

PowerToys has been in preview for a while. You’ll install it when someone shows off FancyZones, which gives you templated tiles to organise your desktop… but you’ll keep it because of the Alt + Space Run command.

This gives you super easy access to apps or open Windows, with a “Run as Administrator” shortcut and an “Open Folder” shortcut. If the application is already running, you’ll see the option with the “Running” annotation alongside it.

You can also launch a shell command by starting your input with >.

It remembers common commands that you run, to save you time.

And finally, you can just use it as a calculator by typing in your calculations.

WinGet quick start

WinGet is basically that thing we all really, really, really wanted for Christmas and we now have it seven months early. It’s a package manager for Windows that let’s you get the apps you want.

There is a super-cool early preview of WinGet available for those who can handle early sight of things… your quick start is to run winget show vscode to view the Visual Studio Code package.

Installing Visual Studio Code is as simple as the following command… you even get a visual progress bar. Neat.

winget install vscode

Create yourself a file with the “stuff your team all uses” and check it into your source control system so you can all keep it up to date. That way, your new folks can be up and running in no time!

PowerToys is awesome and WinGet is ace… and you can use them together too.