HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
microsoft
PowerToys
C2019–2026
microsoft / PowerToys

PowerToys

Microsoft PowerToys is a collection of utilities that supercharge productivity and customization on Windows

ProductivityMobile & DesktopLibraries & SDKs
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
110Distinct people
120Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
140.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Microsoft PowerToys is a collection of utilities that supercharge productivity and customization on Windows

GitHub

Where it is used

  • Windows Run dialog (Windows 11) — Windows Run dialog uses the same CmdPal code from PowerToys for its run command provider. This incorporates PowerToys CmdPal code directly into the shipped Run Dialog. Source

What people are saying

FancyZones (part of Microsoft PowerToys) works well for me. I also like the fact that it's first-party, free and open-source: Project page:…

jmiserez used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year120 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-05-07 00:25:09 UTC to 2026-05-13 11:30:26 UTC.

01020302019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 6 submissions, 9 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 30 mentions; 7 submissions, 23 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 3 submissions, 8 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 3 submissions, 11 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 6 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 0 submissions, 17 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 4 submissions, 10 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1569
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC30723
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1138
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14311
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1367
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17017
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14410
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

What Hacker News says

120 sources
rmast·Jun 20, 2025Submission

Show HN: Inspect and extract files from MSI installers directly in your browser

Hey everyone! I'm excited to share a small web app I built that allows you to view and extract the contents of Windows MSI installers directly in your browser. It's essentially a web-based "lessmsi" powered by Pyodide. You can try it out at: https://pymsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/msi_viewer.html My motivation for building this was from part of my day job -- I often get Windows MSI installers and need to extract files while preserving the relative directory structure and filenames, as they would appear after a full installation. The existing tools I found were good but limited in which platforms they support: lessmsi works great on Windows, while msitools works for Linux/macOS. Neither is a truly cross-platform solution that works on any major OS. So we developed pymsi (a pure Python library, available on GitHub at https://github.com/night
Read the rest
lark/pymsi) to handle reading and extracting MSI files from Python. Then I realized that since pymsi has no native dependencies, it could potentially run in a web browser using Pyodide. After a bit of "vibe coding" and fixing some "hallucinated" functions/classes that don't exist in pymsi, the result was this client-side web app. If you need an MSI file to experiment with, older versions of PowerToys included the installer in .msi form, such as this one: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/download/v0.... Note that the underlying pymsi library hasn't been extensively tested against a bunch of MSI installers yet, so there might still be lingering bugs. If you come across any issues, please don't hesitate to report them in on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/nightlark/pymsi/issues). I'd love to hear your feedback and answer any questions!
135 points · Open discussion

Showing the 15 most recent of 120 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.