PowerToys 0.101.2572.0 Preview Adds Auto Hide Cursor and DSC Deployment for Keyboard Manager
Microsoft has shipped a new preview build of PowerToys, and it quietly answers two of the oldest feature requests in the project's issue tracker. The build, v0.101.2572.0, went up today via release manager LegendaryBlair. It slots right after the previous preview, v0.101.2522.0.
Keep in mind that this is a pre-release, so treat it as software for testers rather than something to roll out to your whole team on a Monday. PowerToys remains Microsoft's grab bag of power-user utilities for Windows: color pickers, screen rulers, image resizers, keyboard remapping, and plenty of smaller tools. It sits at roughly 139,000 stars on GitHub, which is impressive for a project kept alive mostly by volunteers and a few Microsoft folks working on the side.
Two requests, finally handled
The most visible change is Auto Hide Cursor, now part of Mouse Utilities. It drops your pointer after keyboard input or after a configurable stretch of inactivity anywhere from one to 60 seconds, then brings it back the instant you move the mouse or click. Damian Edwards contributed it, and anyone in the .NET world will recognize the name. It merged on September 12 after about two weeks of work and targets issue #11566, a request for an auto-hiding cursor that has been pending for a very long time.
It feels obvious now that the feature exists. You wonder why nobody built it years ago. But there's real engineering underneath it, and not all of it makes it into the release notes. The code runs low-level input hooks inside a supervised Per-Monitor V2 worker process instead of grabbing the ShowCursor counter or poking at the registry, which sidesteps the hacky workarounds people have used for years. Injected input gets ignored, and a small movement threshold filters out cursor noise so a twitchy mouse doesn't wake the pointer constantly. The build also had to survive multiple rounds of cross-version flakiness between Windows 10 and 11 CI before it cleared the bar, ending at 43 of 43 passing local Hyper-V UI tests. One catch: apps that draw their own custom cursors stay unaffected, since PowerToys only controls the standard system pointer.
The change that matters more for a certain crowd is DSC v3 support in Keyboard Manager. Until now you could only remap keys and shortcuts through the GUI editor. That's the part that gets interesting for IT admins. The new build lets you deploy those remappings programmatically through Windows Desired State Configuration, including via WinGet Configuration. It closes issues #38233 and #4452, both sitting in the tracker for a while.
The new DSC resource, Microsoft.PowerToys/KeyboardManagerProfile, uses friendly names like CapsLock rather than raw virtual-key codes. You can declare replacements for whole profiles at once, and a running Keyboard Manager engine picks up the change immediately. No PowerToys restart needed. That last detail matters more than it sounds when you're standardizing a setup across a few hundred machines.
Power Display, the tool for switching between monitor brightness and color temperature profiles, now lets you reorder saved entries. You can drag them around or use a simple Move up and Move down menu. Yu Leng contributed the change, merged September 14, and it clears request #50425. Profiles no longer need to be deleted and recreated just to change their order. A follow-up pull request also trimmed unnecessary settings writes, and the lot passed 629 local tests without a single failure.
The fixes
Not everything in this build is a shiny new feature. The bread-and-butter fixes are here too. Quick Accent had a bug where the toolbar got stuck on screen after focus moved away from the active window, and that's now fixed. Advanced Paste was crashing on HTML-only clipboard content. The Command Palette got a threading stability bump so its UI messages fire on the correct thread. Mouse Without Borders handles reconnection validation a bit more carefully now. And the update banner in Settings gains smooth show and dismiss animations, the kind of polish you only notice when it's missing.
Download-wise, you'll get four installers to choose from: per-user and machine-wide, each for x64 and ARM64, all with SHA-256 hashes listed for verification. It's a pre-release, so stick with the stable build if you'd rather not live on the edge.
Head here to the official release page for v0.101.2572.0 for direct download links.
