To pile on wlesieutre's point, it's a separate app but should be part of every user install IMHO.
Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.
There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
Being baked in or not is a tradeoff. In this case I'd say it would better if it was in, but having a one time download from a trusted source isn't the end of the world either.
I'd make the parallel with browsers: there's an argument for them to stay decoupled from the system.
I suspect being an optionally installable tool for power users gives their team more flexibility to make it a good product in an attempt to keep those users on Windows, if it had big user numbers they’d have to turn it into PowerToys 365 Copilot and make it so opening anything with the launcher tool somehow involved a round-trip through Edge and Bing
I'm sorry, but are you saying pressing the space bar is a power user move? Really? MS cannot include it, as that'd be admitting someone else came up with a better move. Having it as an installable option just says, yeah, it's cool, but only for those worthy. WTF? They just as easily could have had it be ctrl+windows+spacebar, and then it would be just a natural windows user shortcut. Maybe throw in +alt so that it's just smash all four bottom buttons in an angry move. even Apple didn't require it to be OpenApple+spacebar or ClosedApple+spacebar. It's just spacebar right out of the box. No secondary installs or buttons required.
I'm saying the features in PowerToys as a whole are. It includes weird things like a hotkey to crop a live thumbnail out of another window, or to force any window to float always on top, bring up a small thumbnail of all of your screens and click anywhere to teleport the mouse cursor.
Most people shouldn't have a hotkey to lock the active window on top of everything else. If they accidentally press it without knowing what they did, then they have a window stuck in the way and can't even get to The Google to ask it how to unstick it because they can't switch to their web browser window.
And yeah, there are also some features like Peek (the quick preview thing) that would make sense as being pulled out of PowerToys and included as native Windows features, but then they'd get fucked up by whoever is making all the godawful decisions about Windows development lately so I'm glad they haven't. If Peek were part of Windows they'd do something dumb like implement it as "Show this file in Edge" instead. Compared to PowerToys where apparently the developers have been tasked with making something good that people would want to use.
