Power Display Turns the System Tray into a Display Management Tool
The latest PowerToys release introduces Power Display, a new system tray utility that puts core monitor settings just a click away. Instead of hunting for physical buttons on a desktop screen or drilling into Windows Settings, users can now open an icon in the notification area and access supported controls directly. As a PowerToys monitor control, Power Display focuses on essentials such as brightness, which every supported display can expose as a simple slider. Depending on the monitor, additional options may appear, including contrast, color temperature, rotation, and even volume. Multi-monitor setups are also catered for: Power Display can present individual sliders for each connected screen, making it easier to tweak a dual- or triple-monitor layout without leaving the taskbar. It effectively turns the system tray into a lightweight display management tool that stays out of the way until you need it.
How Power Display Streamlines Everyday Monitor Adjustments
Power Display is designed to reduce friction in one of the most common display tasks: quickly changing how your screen looks and feels while you work. Once users download or update PowerToys from the Microsoft Store or GitHub, they can enable Power Display from within the app and customize its behavior. The settings page lets you toggle the utility on or off, assign an activation shortcut so it opens instantly, and decide which controls appear in the pop-up interface. Power users can save custom profiles for different scenarios, such as a low-brightness setup for late-night work or a high-contrast mode for editing visuals. Because it lives in the system tray, Power Display effectively becomes a Windows taskbar shortcut for display tuning, replacing several clicks through menus with a compact, always-available panel.
Grab And Move: Faster Window Management from the Keyboard and Mouse
The same PowerToys update doesn’t stop at display tweaks. It also introduces Grab And Move, a tool that rethinks how windows are repositioned and resized. Traditionally, dragging a window requires clicking the title bar, while resizing means carefully aiming for the window’s edge or corner. Grab And Move removes that precision requirement: by default, holding Alt and clicking anywhere with the left mouse button lets you move a window, while Alt plus the right mouse button resizes it horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. This can be particularly useful on large monitors or when a window has slipped partially off-screen. In its settings, you can switch the activation modifier from Alt to the Windows key, ensure the feature pauses automatically when Game Mode is active, and exclude specific applications whose windows you do not want adjusted this way.
Enhanced PowerToys Utilities That Boost Windows Productivity
Beyond the headline additions, the update also refines several existing PowerToys components to sharpen overall productivity. Command Palette, which surfaces common Windows commands via a keyboard shortcut, now lets users pin their most-used actions so they remain at the top of the list. The Keyboard Manager Editor, a favorite among power users who remap keys and shortcuts, improves how recorded keys are edited, making it simpler to refine custom layouts. ZoomIt, a long-standing utility for screen zooming and annotation, gains support for scrolling screenshots, allowing the capture of long, vertically extended content that doesn’t fit on a single screen. Together with Power Display and Grab And Move, these enhancements reinforce PowerToys’ role as a suite of focused system tray utilities and workflow helpers, aimed squarely at users who want to streamline repetitive tasks and make Windows feel more responsive to how they actually work.