# PowerToys PowerToys is a free, open-source collection of more than 30 utilities for Windows 10 and 11, published by [[Microsoft]] under the MIT license. FancyZones for window layouts, PowerToys Run and Command Palette as launchers, PowerRename for bulk renames with regex, Text Extractor for grabbing text off the screen with OCR, Color Picker, Keyboard Manager, Mouse Without Borders, and ZoomIt for presentations are the best-known ones. Microsoft has done this before. The original PowerToys shipped for Windows 95 in 1996, ran again on Windows XP, then vanished for over a decade before the project was relaunched as open source in May 2019. The modern version is written in C# and C++, and runs on both x64 and ARM64. ## Seven years, still version 0.x The current release is v0.101, published in August 2026. Seven years of active development, and the major version number has never moved off zero. I think that is the right call. A 1.0 label promises a stable surface you can build on, and PowerToys does not offer one. Utilities arrive, utilities change, and Command Palette now sits next to PowerToys Run as the newer launcher. Under 0.x, none of that reads as a broken promise. The practical consequence is simple. Install it, learn the three or four utilities that remove real friction for you, and let the rest sit there untouched. It is a toolbox. Install it through winget (`winget install Microsoft.PowerToys`), which is what I do on every Windows machine I set up. Worth keeping current too, since the project ships often and the newer utilities are usually the good ones. ## Related - [[Microsoft]] - [[Raycast]] (its launcher half overlaps with PowerToys Run and Command Palette; Raycast runs on Windows too) ## References - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/ - https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys