powertoys now lets you crop windows to smaller portions now, so if you want just a small part of a window, you can either create a viewport, or make the main window smaller

also with powertoys run, if you hold shift - alt - space you get the old window controls
most of the reason I disabled it was because it “removed” that or so I thought

@Jessica that’s so neat wth

@blobcat snipping tool completely replaced shareX to me because it’s everything I need in a screenshot tool, and powertoys picked up the slack with other extra features like OCR and stuff.

you can also crop the taskbar lmao

and yes it does remove the taskbar

@Jessica Now I’m curious if it’s possible to crop the explorer.exe somehow.

@techfoxxo yes you can

@Jessica Windows seems to finally get more customizable

@techfoxxo that’s the point of powertoys tbf

@Jessica Really? I think of it more like a small toolbox to do stuff like colorpicking and text extraction

@techfoxxo the first release of powertoys had virtual desktops, x-mouse mode, and other desktop-centric things.
also this has custom tiling, image resizer, power-rename, screen ruler, you can force your webcam to turn off, changing keyboard shortcuts and keys, mouse finter, quick preview, and a caffeine clone
absolutely a cool program and is required for modern windows

@techfoxxo also it has addons to file explorer so you can preview PDFs, markdown, svg’s anf gcode, and various source code files

@techfoxxo also in windows, if you press alt - p you get a preview pane to the right. I completely forgot about it because I thought it was useless, but turns out they updated it so it doesn’t need windows media player anymore

@techfoxxo actually no it just shows a large thumbnail
but that’s what powertoys peek is for with ctrl - space

@techfoxxo powertoys and many other sysinternals packages are just things that maybe not everyone would use, but they thought it would be worth putting out there for the people who may want it.
but personally powertoys is awesome.

@Jessica PowerToys really did evolve a lot it seems.
In the beginning I used it a lot but as of late, especially for work I don’t need most features.
One thing that I like is the registry preview. Oh and the File Locksmith came in handy a few times.

@techfoxxo power toys helped me realize I broke windows with a 5MB hosts file

@techfoxxo the who’s using this file” feature

@techfoxxo my PC needed a reinstall
it was taking a while to boot and there was so many programs that I was never using
always worth a back to basic when you’ve been fucking with your PC too much
my new install literally the first thing I ran was the Chris Titus win util because it just does everything I would do manually automatically including removing spyware and installing essential apps

@techfoxxo oh yea and that “English (world)” trick is awesome.
it saves you having to remove a lot of the bloatware, and at most there’s 5 things to uninstall. not bad.

@techfoxxo just make sure to change it back to your region before you use winget otherwise it doesn’t work at all. windows store is required for winget and eng world disables it

@techfoxxo the power of FOSS

@Jessica @techfoxxo oh wow I had no idea about that utility. I’m immediately bookmarking that for later use.

@Jessica Yeah that region switch trick is pretty neat. Also learned about it a few days ago. Will definitely use that for future windows installs.

And for winget, well. The first thing I do with winget is removing the msstore source.

@techfoxxo I don’t see what’s wrong with ms store.
it’s technically better than play store, you don’t need an account to use it.

@techfoxxo in fact since windows 11, they removed needing to log in as a requirement. I guess they’d assume you would’ve been forced to login via OOIBE

@techfoxxo I just use rufus to make the ISO and turn off all the minimum requirements and ms login crap

@Jessica There is also nothing wrong with the msstore itself.
But for me it was often pretty annoying, that if I want to install for example Thunderbird, that it told me that this is available on the store and on winget itself. I mean yeah that’s cool, but just install it, I don’t want to choose from where.

@techfoxxo I mean there are some cases where the ms store version could be better so I could see why they put that in there

@Jessica Feel that. In the beginning of Win11 I used good old registry keys to have an workaround for the requirements, but since they no longer work I also use rufus and always have a separate USB for windows.

@techfoxxo also have to use chris titus utility to remove the minimum requirement from updates
cool that he has a thingy to let you upg to win11

@Jessica The auto update of the store apps alone is one of the features that makes it pretty attractive to use with winget.
But I just didn’t understand why they not use the msstore as primary source and the winget one as backup. Or the other way around, would also be fine

@techfoxxo fair point

@Jessica Are those requirements nowadays also in the updates??

@techfoxxo I had to do a workaround once to get updates.
also I was in the insider channel and I wasn’t getting updates for a long time
I just used chris titus winutil to defer updates for 2 years and 30d for important updates

@techfoxxo I believe that’s only happened once though, and I remember it being pretty easy as drag and dropping a file in the update folder

@Jessica Interesting. I never had that issue on my old devices with Win11. But that also was a few months ago.
I often used the Group Policies to get into the insider ring without needing a MS account. It´s a neat little trick if you don´t want to use a MS account

@techfoxxo I used offlineinsiderenroll app
https://github.com/abbodi1406/offlineinsiderenroll