KeePass2.x VS PowerToys

And the best part is there are solutions already that do this: https://keepass.info/

Does it work on Android or iOS?

🔗 KeePass

When you're at a point where you're relying on a display name to make security-critical decisions, you've already lost.

Character substitutions like ķeepass or ƙeepass or keypass are at least possible to spot if you know the name of the product, but not the full URL.

But there are many ways to create lookalike domains that don't change the product name: https://keepass.org https://keepass.net https://keepass.info https://keepass.cx https://keepassxc.org https://keepass-info.net https://keepass-manager.com

Which of these is the correct one? (It's https://keepassxc.org of course, but just looking at the URL won't tell you that.)

The root cause is downloading software you see advertised on Google even though that does not in any way establish trustworthiness.

> People love to hate on passwords but the reality is that for many circumstances (threat models) they are the best compromise. You can make them more than strong enough (take 32+ bytes out of /dev/random and encode however you like, nobody will ever brute force that in this universe) and various passwords managers solve the problem of re-use (never reuse a password).

> And it comes with the benefit that you control how it is stored and can apply as much redundancy as you want to feel comfortable.

Honestly, I agree! I used KeePass back in the day (https://keepass.info/) but now use KeePassXC (https://keepassxc.org/) and it's really nice - I don't know any of my passwords because they're all randomly generated and are pretty secure. The only one I have to remember is my main password for decrypting the safe, which I also wrote down and entrusted to someone close to me due to its complexity.

It honestly works great, software to interact with the password safe is on every platform where I need it to be, in addition to it being super easy to reason about storage, because it's basically just a file - that I can then put on self-hosted Nextcloud, or another solution like that, or USB sticks or burn to CDs for all I care.

Maybe I should also migrate all of my TOTP stuff over to it and look into good Android apps at some point, then I wouldn't quite need Google Authenticator or FreeOTP anymore, either.

If you have used this combo at many sites (which is of course not recommended) then download one of the available free Password Managers like Keepass, Bitwarden, Lastpass or any others you can find with a Google Search

I also tried out KeePass for a little bit but prefer the BitWarden apps. The key thing here is don't store your passwords in the cloud as they are massive target for hackers.

There are various Keepass add-ons, but I prefer the standalone version.

Best KeePass Windows desktop client: KeePass

If though you can't stand the idea of your password vault on a 3rd party server then you can use an offline password manager like KeePass. Of course, you have to take responsibility for making and storing backups of your vault in case something happens to your device. Fortunately, Syncthing can make this pretty trivial.

Windows PowerToys GitHub Repo

RunFlow is a cross-platform productivity tool which can launch apps and search files and more, that similar to Wox and PowerToys on Windows, and also similar like Alfred and Raycast on macOS. But we have differences with these tools, and we have our own unique new features. Right now, at the below, we will introduce you what features of RunFlow have been implemented in more details. It's an amazing journey, let's start.

I'm curious - when you were doing research into the mechanics of hinting options, did you stumble onto any relevant discussion around allowing custom pixel geometries to be defined, to enable hinting on modern OLED / WRBG displays? There's a good thread on the topic here[0], with some people referring to it as 'ClearType 2' on the MS side [1]. On the oss side I know FreeType theoretically supports this[2], but I can't quite figure out how relevant the FreeType backend is to this most recent work.

This is great work btw.

[0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

[2]: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-lcd_render...

Thank you all for the informative advices. Here is the summary for those who are in the same situation:

1. Run Windows on Linux by using VM

for the applications you can’t run on Linux

Risks:

* some softwares may attempt to detect VMs and refuse running

* Anything what needs to touch hardware may not work.

2. separate "data" partition on D:

3. back up %APPDATA% and %USERPROFILE%

4. learn chocolatey, scoop or winget

Winget should be good enough

5. Don’t worry about C:\Program Files

6. (Mixed) Use/Don’t use Ansible (or saltstack/salt)

Use:

* Allows you to setup a new machine quickly and consistently when one breaks, get stolen, or lost in an inconvenient time.

* You can get a clean and consistent development environment so that you do not depend on anything accidentally installed on the machine.

* If you define specialised roles, create test playbooks for those individual roles, use these roles to compose more complex playbooks, and offload logic to custom ansible modules that are written in python, you won't wrestle with heavy logic in the template or playbook layer.

* installing software and pulling some configs and scripts down is fine

Don’t use:

* You will spend your days fighting a mix of yaml and Jinja.

* You will end up looking at Python errors because there are no static types.

* errors are cryptic.

7. Use WSL2

You need 32gb of ram, but ram is cheap so choose a good thinkpad

8. Debloat with Recommended Tweaks

Run

irm christitus.com/win | iex

from Administrator Terminal (Powershell)

The link leads to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/mai...

VirusTotal

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/709834b0e003b6bb546cf16e...

9. Get [PowerToys](https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys)

10. Use Devbox for containered environment

https://www.jetpack.io/devbox

11. Dual-Booting Linux and Windows

If you use physically separated drives, you don’t need partitioning.

12. Dedicated Windows machine for class

Yes it sure would be the cleanest solution but I prefer one device for everything

13. keep a git repository with all dot files in it

Many people suggested me to use virtualization, otherwise just let Windows be Windows.

Also, backing up seems to be a good practice.

I’m planning to write a blog about this, if it worked.

Again, thank you all for the helps!

Powertoys Run (https://github.com/microsoft/powertoys) can do this. There are not that many plugins as Alfred but Window Switcher is built-in.

For sharing a mouse/keyboard between Windows PCs, there is Mouse Without Borders. It's included in PowerToys nowadays.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

- https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

If you’re on Windows, download PowerToys. It’s an app published by Microsoft officially. Then enable Quick Accent in the settings of PowerToys. Now all you have to do is hold down the key you want accented until the switch shows up, then add an accent with your arrow keys.

microsoft/PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity (github.com)