Windows Finally Has Automatic Light and Dark Mode, with PowerToys
Microsoft has just released PowerToys 0.95 update, named “Eclipse”. and it’s packed with quality of life improvements and performance enhancements. This release addresses a ton of long-standing community requests.
This new update brings a few new features, but my favorite is probably the new Light Switch utility. This brand new utility automatically switches your PC between light and dark modes. You can either set custom start and end times or simply let Light Switch do the work for you by using your location’s sunrise and sunset times. If you want to change it a bit, you can adjust the lag so it starts a little earlier or later. It even lets you choose whether the shell, applications, or both should change.
If you’re a quick person, there’s a keyboard shortcut you can configure to activate on the fly. If you’ve never used something like this, I highly recommend it. It’s much better to use night mode on your devices before bed than to try to sleep after using bright lights.
The control palette has also received a huge upgrade in terms of speed. The Power Tools command palette was a little slow, but this version brings an all-new fuzzy comparator with smarter fallbacks that make search results both faster and more relevant.
To give you an idea of how fast it is, the development team provided some real numbers. Searching for “access” went from 633 ms to 113 ms. The search for “co-pilot” went from 257 ms to 78 ms. Finally, the search time for “4*4” went from 124 ms to just 3 ms. These are major improvements.
Under the hood, the team limited app results in the All Apps extension to a default value of 10 (which is configurable), fixed an issue where the command palette was throwing many exceptions during searches, and added logic to undo previous searches when you type something new. Beyond speed, they’ve also tweaked the experience with a new gallery/grid view for search results and an option to turn animations on or off.
Another great feature is that you can now open Peek simply by pressing the spacebar. No need for a custom shortcut anymore, and this is the new default behavior going forward. This is a small but consistent improvement that will make the Peek utility much faster to use.
According to Microsoft, the Find My Mouse utility has received many requests from the community and the team has been working on it so that it now supports transparency. You can make the highlight fully transparent by heading to the Appearance section and adjusting the transparency slider for the slider color. This is ideal when you want a more subtle effect but still need utility.
If you’re experiencing shortcut conflicts, the Settings menu has been improved. The latest version introduced hotkey conflict detection, and you can now ignore specific conflicts directly from the dialog, so they stop appearing. Additionally, you can now completely remove shortcut assignments for utilities you don’t use by using the Clear button in the configuration dialog. This makes it easier to remove shortcuts for utilities you don’t use.
Some other notable changes include the mouse pointer crosshair which only shows the horizontal line, the vertical line or both, and the sliding cursor, which can now be canceled with the Escape key. Additionally, ZoomIt now supports smooth zooming of images.
Microsoft said it’s not about speeding things up and users can expect more performance improvements from additional features in the coming months. The company plans a revamped Keyboard Manager UI, custom endpoint and local template support for Advanced Paste, more command palette improvements, and an all-new shortcut guide experience. However, for now, you can just enjoy this new PowerToys update.
You can download the update now, and if you don’t already have PowerToys, it’s available on the Microsoft Store or GitHub repository.
Source: Microsoft Developer Blog
