ShareX VS PowerToys

I've been using ShareX (https://getsharex.com/) for some years, which is also open-source, and very featureful while not feeling too bloated, though Windows only.

I'll have to have a look at this next time I'm on a Linux desktop, as I found the options lacking compared to ShareX last time I looked.

For Windows: ShareX - https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX

Best For Screenshots/Recording: ShareX

ShareX will run on that machine no problem. Open-source & free. https://i.imgur.com/KQAoDin.jpg

ShareX [1] is my other "must install" app. I never would have guessed how much my branch of engineering consists of "take a screenshot and draw lines, arrows and circles on it." Being able to customize my workflow to do all of that is really great.

[1] https://getsharex.com/

Source: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/issues/6983

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

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!