PowerToys Preview v0.101.2512.0 lands as a maintenance sprint, fixing a 6-month Command Palette regression
Microsoft pushes a hardening build just two days after the last release, with no new features but a significant quality-of-life patch for the Command Palette.
Microsoft dropped PowerToys Preview v0.101.2512.0 today, and this one is a straight shot to the chest of anyone who's been fighting the Command Palette. The new build addresses a keyboard-focus regression that's been open since February 2026, expands the installer's process-killer list, and finally adds automated test suites for Environment Variables and Crop And Lock. No new features here. If you're looking for the Color Picker migration or Awake improvements, those shipped two days ago in v0.101.2492.0. This is housekeeping.
That two-day gap between builds tells you something about the current pipeline. The team is moving fast, using the Sept 9 release to catch last-minute quality issues from the feature-heavy v0.101.2492.0 rather than rushing new code out the door. It's a pragmatic move, though it means this build is narrowly scoped: five pull requests merged over a week, contributed by a handful of core collaborators.
The Command Palette fix finally lands
The Command Palette would lose keyboard focus the moment you clicked empty space inside the window. After that, every shortcut became unresponsive until you manually re-focused the window. It's a mundane interaction pattern, which makes the bug more frustrating. Jiří Polášek (@jiripolasek) fixed it by adding a LosingFocus event handler that cancels focus transfers to ShellPage's ancestors while the window is open. Michael Jolley (@michaeljolley) merged it after about three and a half hours of review.
The bug has been reported since February 26, 2026. For what it's worth, six months is a long time to wait for a focus regression fix. The underlying WinUI internals work required to patch focus events without breaking other controls is tricky, but the delay still stings for users who hit this regularly.
Installer and test coverage improvements
The installer has been a frequent pain point for users dealing with leftover processes blocking updates. PR #50452, submitted by @moooyo, expands the processesToTerminate list from 54 entries to 65. It adds missing CLI targets, installed shims, DSC tools, and the Shortcut Guide index generator. The matching logic is now case-insensitive, too. That matters because some binaries ship as .Cli.exe and others as .CLI.exe. Windows doesn't care, but the installer logic used to. You'll also notice that three "update coordinator" processes are still exempt from the kill list. Killing those would interrupt a self-update in progress.
On top of that, @khmyznikov landed two first-ever end-to-end test suites. The Environment Variables module gets ten scenarios covering profile management, variable editing, and PATH manipulation. The Crop And Lock module gets six scenarios including thumbnail handling, reparenting, and settings toggles. These modules historically lacked automated verification. The test runners use winappcli and handle UAC elevation carefully, with the Environment Variables suite explicitly skipping elevated system-variable tests since UAC's secure desktop breaks automation. Both suites passed 36/36 scenarios in CI across Windows 10, Windows 11, and ARM64 builds.
Finally, PR #50419 by @noraa-junker adds a documentation entry crediting the open-source Shortcut Guide v2 community contribution on PowerToys' community page. It's a pure documentation change. No code impact, but the credit is due.
Head here to download the release from GitHub
