FOR~GO
(For Geeks Only)
By Joe Callison
24 August 2021
The Microsoft community of developers and customer/users post their on-going creations on GitHub for access by anyone, whether you are a contributor to the development or just want to try out what they are working on. Eventually some of the creations make it into the official Windows distribution as new features. Three features that caught my interest and a sample user contribution are in the following.
Power Toys
Releases · microsoft/PowerToys · GitHub
This is a collection of nine utilities that have been developed. Installing and running the app will add an icon in your hidden items that will launch the following screen. The icon is shown under the About Power Toys part of the screen snip. Some utilities I have found useful are:
Awake, to temporarily keep your computer awake without changing the power settings.
Image Resizer, a feature added to the menu when right-clicking on an image file.
Shortcut Guide, a display of all Windows keyboard shortcuts that you can also use to select the shortcuts from.
Windows Subsystem for Linux
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
I have not actually used this yet because the process for installing it in Windows 10 is a rather complicated manual process: https://www.windowscentral.com/install-windows-subsystem-linux-windows-10
When Windows 11 comes out, it will be one simple command in PowerShell: wsl –install
Note, the Windows subsystem for Linux does not include a GUI interface, only a command line. It is primarily meant for software developers needing to run Linux code.
PowerShell
GitHub – PowerShell/PowerShell: PowerShell for every system!
This project is an on-going development of the Windows Terminal Preview, which adds tabs, color features, and many other enhancements to the terminal utility. By default, you not only have the PowerShell tab, but you can add tabs for Command Prompt, Azure, and other command line processes.
Sample User Contribution
https://github.com/Awesome-Windows/Awesome#utilities
A useful curated list and links to the best applications and tools for Windows.
