PowerToysRunScoop VS PowerToys

It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.

Example 1: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/

The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.

The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?

Yeah think its a ClearType issue[0] specifically then

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

It's active again, they've open sourced and reinvested in it with new utilities.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

You can download the latest version of PowerToys from the official GitHub repository. Alternatively, my brother wrote a helpful guide on how to download and install the PowerToys tool on your Windows 11 PC.

Research on Trending GitHub Repository As this is my first blog post on dev.to, so I did some research on a trending Git Hub repository, and provide insights into its usefulness and features. I chose to explore Microsoft's PowerToys repository, which has gained significant traction in the developer community.

+1 for power toys

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

also, Cygwin if you need it

Obligatory FancyZones/PowerToys links:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys?tab=readme-ov-file

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

FancyZones is a Microsoft tiling window management utility from their PowerToys collection.

> If you're on Windows you should try the powertools OCR tool.

Which is open source (MIT-licensed), the source code is here: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/main/src/modules...

It is written in C#, and uses the Windows.Media.Ocr UWP API to do the actual OCR part: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr?... – so if your app runs on Windows it can potentially call the same API and get OCR for free

Apple provides OCR through VisionKit ImageAnalyzer API – https://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionkit/imageana... – albeit that is only officially supported to call from Swift (although apparently you can expose it to Objective C if your write a "proxy Swift framework"–a custom Swift framework that wraps the original and adds @objc everywhere). There is also the older VNRecognizeTextRequest API which is supported by Objective C, but its OCR quality is inferior.

I'm not sure what the best answer for Linux or Android is. I guess https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract ?

Microsoft PowerToys