I used to find Microsoft Windows lengthy to setup well and to maintain in good order. It’s become easier, and Windows 10 is particularly easy to manage. Being a desktop environment, it comes with a lot of what we might need. Here I run through some minimalist tools that I use to fill in a few gaps:

  • AutoHotkey - ($MSWin10\AutoHotkey\HPEB840G37.ahk) is invaluable!
  • Bulk Rename for fast renaming of many files
  • CapsLock gets me a tray icon, which I need on my Lenovo ThinkPad T430 i5-3320M which has no LED indicator…
  • ctrl+shift+esc = Task Manager, which I set to show Processes and hide when minimized - very handy
  • Ditto is my preferred clipboard, invaluable to my workflow
  • Everything (software) - for instantly finding files on your system
  • File Explorer is an ever handy tool
    • alt-d > wt jumps me out to Windows Terminal on the current directory
    • alt-p toggles the preview pane, I use my asAdminWEPreviewPane.ps1 to add extra text file types
  • Microsoft PowerToys has some nice components - you can see how I configure it in my $machine\Win10ProBuild.txt.
  • Notepad++ is my go-to editor when I don’t want to or can’t use a vim flavour, or emacs.
  • Quick Hash GUI is what I use to compute hashes
  • Sysinternals - an excellent collection of small tools, here are some of which I keep the executables in my C:\Users\troin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps for direct access from PowerShell: