#74: ZoomIt joins the other ’toys

Posted on May 8, 2025 by ewand

There’s a long history of people building cool add-ons and tools for Windows. From “Tiny Elvis” which amazed Win3.1 users, to a whole suite of tech-nerd extensions called Winternals, offering stuff that could peer under the hood of the then-new Windows NT system. Some were officially produced – the Microsoft Plus! pack for Win95, or numerous Resource Kit tools spring to mind.

Microsoft internal teams released a free set of utilities called PowerToys for Windows 95: some background to the developments came out 20 years ago.

A new PowerToys package appeared more recently for Windows 10 and 11 – it’s a free collection of numerous utilities which extend Windows in some way. Some have featured in previous ToWs – #647 and #15 among them (the former being Old Testament before the Great Reset, the latter being in the new world).

PowerToys is updated regularly on GitHub (see details on https://aka.ms/powertoysresleasenotes) and gets bug fixes for some of the tools, or periodically, whole new additions. After 5 years, it’s still “Preview” and has reached v0.90.1. Perhaps that version number is asymptotic, in that it will never actually be 1.0.

There are currently 25+ tools ranging from occasionally useful things like Find My Mouse to larger, previously separate utilities which might be used every day, like Mouse without Borders.

Look on the system tray for the colourful PowerToys icon and left-click on it to get the Quick access menu (currently non-customizable, which is a bit odd – like, how often do you need to edit your Hosts file? ).

Double-click on the PowerToys system tray icon and you’ll get a more expansive dialog, allowing you to enable or disable individual utilities and get a reminder of what the keystroke is to invoke it.

Don’t fall asleep

One of those occasionally handy tools that, when enabled, has its own system tray icon, is Awake.

It shows up as a coffee cup in the System tray and can be used to over-ride any compulsion your PC has to go to sleep or even blank the screen. Handy if you’re downloading something from a slow network and you need to keep the PC active, or you want to keep the machine available for remote access etc.

Another use case is when using PIP/split-screen modes on large monitors, things can get a bit unpredictable if the primary input disappears through power saving schemes. Setting a longer timeout for the “Keep awake” will mean the screen doesn’t blank so quickly, until you revert to normal and let the machine’s power plan take over.

Zoom Zoom!

A recent addition to PowerToys is ZoomIt (not to be confused with the metadirectory services company which was a forerunner to Microsoft Identity Manager).

If you’ve ever watched Azure CTO and all round technical fellow Mark Russinovich present at a major conference, you’ve almost certainly seen him using ZoomIt. In a nutshell, you can zoom into a static grab of the screen, using the mouse or trackpad to smoothly zoom in and out. It lets you annotate highlights using the mouse – Mark would do this to underline some part of a demo he was giving, showing where something has changed or where a command should be entered.

As well as zooming on a static view, it can also zoom into a live part of the screen too (which might be handy for doing precision mousing), plus some other neat presenter-friendly tricks like having a full-screen countdown timer.

ZoomIt was originally built by Mark’s company Winternals, which became SysInternals, and was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. The tool is available standalone from PowerToys if you prefer, alongside many other technical utilities.

#42: Making Gestures in & out of Windows

Posted on August 30, 2024 by ewand

Windows, you may or may not know, has a lot of gestures built in. Not the kind that Mr Clarkson observes while driving a flash car, thinking oncoming motorists may be drying their hands, but more useful. Windows 8 pioneered gestures on touch-screen machines, where you’d swipe around the edges of the screen to perform certain tasks.

If you’re unfamiliar with modern-day gestures, they inhabit a number of rooms in the house. They are perhaps less on the critical path to making stuff work than the Win8 things that confused regular end users; gestures these days are there to provide a quicker or snazzier way of doing something for those in the know but if you don’t use them, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Touch

Firstly, there are touch gestures – if you have a touchscreen machine, obvs. These are relatively simple actions you can do on-screen using multiple fingers, which control the way you interact with Windows. You might have them turned off, but they should be on by default – look under Bluetooth & devices in Settings, and under Touch you can switch them on.

If you see the “Touch screen to wake” option, you’re using an up-to-date machine which supports Wake-on-Touch, allowing you to poke the screen with a single digit to wake from standby.

If you have a touch screen, you’re probably familiar with selecting stuff by tapping it or scrolling the screen by dragging it around, but there are other moves you might be less familiar with. What about showing the Notifications Center by dragging one finger – Win8 stylee – from the outside right edge of the screen, or the Widgets by doing the same from the left?

How about using THREE fingers to swipe up, down, left and right?

Pad

If you don’t have a touch screen but do have a laptop with a touchpad, there are loads of gestures you can enable and configure there… somewhat similar to the on-screen versions.

Did you know that tapping two fingers (close to one another – eg two fingers on one hand) on the touchpad has the same effect as right-clicking? See more on Touch gestures for Windows.

Browsing gestures

Finally, even if you don’t have the delights of touch on screen or pad, there are gestures you can set up on Edge for using your mouse while browsing – in fact, they’re possibly best done with an actual, physical mouse rather than faffing about with a touchpad.

To enable, make sure your browser is up to date then check Settings / Appearance and scroll a long way down to Customise browser. Or just search gesture in the settings and look for the enable/configure Mouse Gesture buttons.

Gestures in the browser let you do stuff by holding the right^* button on your mouse in combo with an action like swiping the mouse in a direction or using a pattern:

While you hold the right mouse button down and make an appropriate mouse movement, you’ll see it being drawn on the screen with a banner telling you what it means…

If you don’t like the default gestures in Edge, or you’re using Chrome, then you could try a 3^rd party gesturing addon: Chrome Web Store – Search Results.

* for a while, Microsoft tried to call the right mouse button – one of the big differentiators between Windows and Mac (whose users could only deal with a single button) – the “secondary mouse button”, in recognition that left-handers who swap the buttons around are not using the actual button on the right. Or right-handed deviants who like using the wrong button.

673 – Where is my mouse?

Posted on March 17, 2023 (Updated March 17, 2023) by ewand

The “mouse” was invented 60 years ago, as a means of moving a cursor around on-screen. Through many generations of hardware, it evolved from using wheels to rubbery balls, before eventually going sensor-based and even losing the tail that may have helped coin its original name

Since many people now use laptops with touchpads, they won’t even use an external meecely peripheral but the term “mouse” is still often used to refer to the pointer that it controls. Finding that pointer on your desktop can sometimes be a challenge, especially if you have multiple screens on your computer, and particularly if at least one of them is a snazzy ultrawide job.

The free PowerToys addons to Windows 11 includes a section of Mouse utilities; install the full PowerToys suite and you can usually enable each feature individually, and set what mechanism you’d use to invoke it. Perhaps the most useful is the “Find my Mouse” keyboard shortcut – just press the CTRL key twice in quick succession, and the screen dims with a spotlight on where your pointer currently is. Press CTRL once again to remove it and go back to normal.

There are loads of settings to tweak how some of the utilities work – Find my Mouse could be enabled by shaking your mouse if you’d prefer. There’s also a highlighter feature that indicates if you’re pressing a left or right mouse button, or a crosshair view which, when turned on, sets a permanent crosshair display (again, configurable in numerous ways) that remains in place until you repeat the key combo to switch it off.

Mice can jump high – who knew?

A new mousey feature in the latest release of PowerToys is called Mouse Jump – erstwhile known as FancyMouse – and lets you teleport your mouse pointer from one side of a potentially massive desktop to another.

This is particularly handy if you have multiple screens set at different heights, and in order to traverse from one side of the desktop to the other would take you multiple swipes of a physical mouse or strokes of a touchpad.

Press the activation key and you’ll see a shrunken version of the desktop in a small window; click where you want the pointer to vamoose to on that depiction of the display and it will teleport to the other side of the desktop.

644 – Desktop, sans frontières

Posted on August 19, 2022 by ewand

As a companion to last week’s tip on projecting your desktop to anotherPC, here’s another related but slightly inverted topic; using one machine to control multiple desktops. Previously, this would have been achieved by sharing means of input and output across multiple PCs with a KVM device – where you’d plug your keyboard, video and mouse for each machine into one box, and could switch between them somehow. There are other options today thankfully, that don’t result in a rat’s nest of cable.

A simple way of using another PC from your main one is Remote Desktop – if you have a Windows PC that’s running Professional or Enterprise version, you can enable the ability to remotely connect to it from elsewhere, a feature that is not enabled by default. To switch it on, type remote at the Start menu and you’ll see the option to swtich it on.

Once enabled, and you’ve chosen which user accounts can access it, you will be able to fire up the Remote Desktop client on your other machine and connect to this one, using its name or IP address. For a quick way to kick if off, enter mstsc /v <name> at the Start menu on your main machine to establish the connection directly.

You’ll have the source PC in a window or full-screen, even supporting multiple monitors if the PC that is driving things has several screens, configured in the slightly old-fashioned looking Remote Desktop Connection app that’s used as the client to your remote session.

Remote Desktop has its roots in an old server version of Windows NT, with the idea that users’ desktops could be run and managed in a central location. With Remote Desktop running on a local network, you can get sound and high quality video directed from one PC to another, and even copy & paste between them – it’s a really good way of driving a corporate laptop from a PC with bigger screens and better keyboard & mouse.

Another way of dealing with the frontières (pas de jeux… did you know that Kate Bush sang that French backing vocal?) is to use a more up-to-date variant of the KVM switch.

If you have multiple machines next to one another, there’s a great, free software KVM from an internal Microsoft project that release semi-experimental software to the outside, which lets you use the same keyboard & mouse to drive both – or multiple, up to 4 – machines. Install Mouse without Borders on each machine, connect them together using a shared password, and you’ll be able to just move your mouse between PCs, and the keyboard in front of you will operate whichever machine the mouse is pointing at.

The UI at set-up for MWB is very early 2000s but once you’ve got it running, it’s pretty much bulletproof – if you have two machines, the keyboard and mouse on both will stay active and be interchangeable… so if you had two laptops, you could use the software on either machine to control both. It’s knockout!

Tip o’ the Week #286 – Windows Explorer tweaks in Win10

Posted on July 24, 2015 by ewand

Here’s a quick tip on navigating around Windows 10, courtesy of Stuart Leeks, concerning the File Explorer app (now, thanks to Internet Explorer being moved to the background in favour of the Microsoft Edge browser, maybe the name Explorer will be primarily known again as way to get to the file system).

The simplest way of getting the File Explorer running is either to click on the icon that’s pinned to the taskbar by default, or else simply press the WindowsKey+e. Out of the box, you’ll see a couple of changes to simplify File Explorer when compared to Windows 8, namely to show recent files and folders and the Quick Access pane, as the main display of the Explorer window, rather than clip_image006 just showing a list of drive letters or network locations.

If you prefer going back to seeing “My PC” as the default, click on the View menu > Options > Change folder and search options, and modify that behaviour. Quick Access is new in Windows 10, and replaces the previous Win8.x Explorer’s Favorites section.

The original feature that Stuart referred to has been found to partially exist in Windows 8.1 too, so maybe it’s a bit of a hidden gem – when in File Explorer, if you press ALT+d, the cursor & focus jumps to the address bar and you clip_image010 can start typing the name of key folders and recent files, and you’ll see the name show up in autocomplete – so to get to Downloads, just start typing down and then with a single press of the down cursor key then enter, you’ll jump straight there. This may seem trivial but to hardened keyboardistas, any reason to not use the mouse without getting too obscure, is a good one.

clip_image012 If you still like using the pointing doodah, you can click on the caret to the side of the icon that shows whatever folder you’re in (and it will change as you move around), and you’ll get a short cut menu that also includes regularly used folders.

clip_image014 Another neat one, for some at least, is that if you select a folder within Explorer, and go to the File Menu, you’ll get the option of launching a command prompt or PowerShell window with the focus directly on that folder

Tip o’ the Week #218 – Have you got the touch?

Posted on May 2, 2014 by ewand

clip_image002

Using “touch” in computing has evolved so much in just the last five years. First phones then tablets evolved a new UI around using your fingers rather than a pointer & mouse, and with Windows 8, touch really got mainstream on regular PCs too. How many times do you prod the screen of a laptop then realise it’s not touch-capable?

Well, more advanced means of using touch have sprung up in ways other than just the screen. Most laptops nowadays have ditched the “Pointing Stick” (careful if you go searching online for the other terms one might use) and have adopted a touchpad of some sort. Originally, this was just an annoying way of moving your mouse around with repeated swipes, but as people are more used to them, and they’ve got more effective, it’s generally the preferred way of pointer movement on a laptop.

Unless you have a real external mouse, of course, which is always better.

clip_image004 Microsoft’s been working with partners for a while now on a new generation of touchpad, called a “Precision Touchpad”. The idea with the Precision TP is that it replicates the gestures you might use on-screen – see more information here. Check if your machine has a PTP by looking under the Mouse and touchpad section in PC Settings. (sorry about that last link).

If you prefer using one of the growing band of touch-enabled meeces then you should make sure you have the Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center installed on your PC. If you’re equipped with an appropriate rodent, you can do all sorts of one, two and even three-fingered gestures and your machine will respond without fuss or complaint. Well, it will once you’ve practiced a bit…

The excellent Wedge Touch Mouse (essential equipment for anyone with a laptop not bristling with USB ports – ie most of them – since it doesn’t need a USB dongle to work, given that it uses Bluetooth) sadly doesn’t support the full gamut of multi-digit expressions, however it does allow you to scroll horizontally and vertically – useful for navigating the Windows 8.1 start screen or simply moving around in long documents.