New month, new release! This one’s packed with quality-of-life improvements, performance boosts, and a bunch of long-standing community requests finally checked off the list — all while keeping the focus on fundamentals like speed and reliability! Get the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or heading to the release page. Let’s dive in!
🆕 Automatically switch between light and dark-mode with Light Switch
Meet Light Switch, a brand-new utility that automatically switches your PC between light and dark mode! You can set custom start and end times, or let Light Switch handle it for you by using the sunrise and sunset times for your location. Want it to start a little earlier or later? Just tweak the offset to your liking. You can also choose whether the shell, apps, or both should switch – and, in case you want to toggle on the fly; just configure a keyboard shortcut
PR: #41987
⚡Command Palette goes brrr
We’ve heard you — you want Command Palette to find things faster than ever. This release brings a brand-new fuzzy matcher with smarter fallbacks that makes search results both faster and more relevant.
Under the hood, we’ve made several key improvements:
- Removed ranking for fallback extensions (except Calculator and Run), so they now appear at the bottom of results.
- Fixed an issue where Command Palette was throwing a lot of exceptions during searches — especially when multiple extensions were installed. This was throttling performance quite a bit.
- Added logic to cancel previous searches when you type something new, so only your latest query is processed.
- Limited app results in the All Apps extension to a default of 10 (configurable to 0, 1, 5, or 10).
Quick comparison of the fallback improvements:
Together, these changes make Command Palette feel snappier, more efficient, and way smoother to use. These aren’t lab-grade benchmarks, but here’s a peek at some real-world numbers our dev team gathered while testing search speed improvements:
| Search term | 0.94 | 0.95 |
|---|---|---|
| access | 633ms | 113ms |
| copilot | 257ms | 78ms |
| github | 102ms | 101ms |
| 4*4 | 124ms | 3ms |
Beyond performance, we’ve also polished up the experience with: * A new gallery/grid view for search results * An option to toggle animations on or off * Tons of bug fixes and small tweaks throughout.
PR: #41959
👀 Peek with the Space bar
Another community favorite: you can now open Peek **by simply pressing the **Space bar — no more custom shortcut required! This is now the default behavior for Peek going forward.
PR: #41867
🖱️ Find My Mouse now supports transparency
Another big community ask: you can now make the Find My Mouse highlight fully transparent. Just head to the Appearance section and adjust the transparency slider for the cursor color — great for when you want a subtler effect.
PR: #41701
🎹 Ignore shortcut conflicts and unassign shortcuts
Last release introduced shortcut conflict detection, and we’ve expanded on it this time. You can now ignore specific conflicts directly from the conflict dialog so they no longer show up as a conflict.
We’ve also added the option to completely unassign shortcuts in the configuration dialog using the Clear button. This makes it easy to remove shortcuts for any utilities you don’t use.
PR: #41729
🧩 Other notable changes
- Mouse Pointer Crosshairs now lets you show only the horizontal line, vertical line, or both.
- Added support for Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3, so it’s easier to setup a new device with the same settings.
- Gliding Cursor can now be canceled with the Esc key.
- Added a Welsh layout with acute, grave, and dieresis variants for vowels in Quick Accent.
- ZoomIt now supports smooth image zooming.
✨ Big thanks to the community
A huge shoutout to Jiří Polášek (@jiripolasek) for contributing over 20 pull requests in this release! And of course, a big thank-you to everyone else who contributed — we couldn’t do it without you! Thanks @chakrik73, @daverayment, @DevLGuilherme, @foxmsft,, @michaeljolley, @mikeclayton, @mikehall-ms, @mKpwnz, @PesBandi and @samrueby for your pull requests!
🚀 What’s next?
We are planning some nice new features and improvements for the next releases – a revamped Keyboard Manager UI, custom endpoint and local model support for Advanced Paste, Commmand Palette improvements and a brand-new Shortcut Guide experience! Stay tuned!
We’re always happy to get your feedback and contributions – whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or a pull request. Head over to the PowerToys repo to jump in.
The full release notes can be found here.
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