Today, Microsoft held a community call on YouTube to discuss various improvements to its development tools like Dev Drive, Dev Home, WSL, and more. During the livestream, Microsoft also demoed a new utility that will soon be added to PowerToys. It’s called Workspaces and should be available in the next PowerToys update, version 0.84.
Demonstrated today on Windows Developer Chat: PowerToys Workspaces version 0.84 (slides titled “App Layouts”). Create workspaces for each of your workflows and get back to productivity with a single click by reconfiguring everything the way you configured it.
– Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) 15 August 2024
Although the focus of the presentation was on developers, any user who wants to save time and clicks on repetitive tasks will appreciate the new utility.
In short, PowerToys Workspaces (called “App Layouts” in the Windows Dev Chat demo) allow you to create groups of applications, arrange them in a specific order on the screen, add some arguments or additional commands, and then create a shortcut to launch all of those groups.
For example, with just one click, you can launch Visual Studio on the left side of the screen, Terminal in the upper right corner, and Microsoft Edge in the lower right corner of the screen. You can create multiple workspaces and keep them on the desktop for quick access. Here’s a demo of how this feature works:
PowerToys Workspaces lets you capture existing layouts with apps running, apps on different monitors, and even minimized applications. Additionally, you can add CLI arguments, launch apps as administrator, specify window sizes, states, and more.
There is no information on when exactly PowerToys Workspaces will be available, but since the app receives updates quite frequently, the wait shouldn’t be too long. As usual, PowerToys 0.84 should also bring improvements to already existing modules and utilities.
