Microsoft PowerToys Preview adds command "deep links" and Workspaces safety guardrails
Microsoft just released a new PowerToys Preview build, and this one leans into polish over spectacle. The latest release, v0.101.2632.0, landing a few days after the previous preview and packing in a batch of productivity tweaks and safety fixes rather than anything you'd call headline-grabbing.
For those who live in the Preview channel, this is a familiar cadence. PowerToys is Microsoft's free, open-source toolkit of 25+ utilities for Windows 10 and Windows 11, and it moves roughly every few days during active development. This cycle is no exception. There's no big new feature here, but the refinements are the kind that quietly stop things from grinding you down.
The Command Palette is getting more powerful
The headline change is in Command Palette, and it's a real one. You can now generate and copy "deep link" commands for palette actions, gated behind consent prompts and permission management. That's a meaningful step toward making Command Palette the central launch surface for the whole suite, and it opens the door for third-party extensions to hook in more gracefully.
Contributor jiripolasek also tidied up clipped "Pin to Dock" dialogs that were getting cut off in compact window sizes. Those small crop issues are exactly the kind of thing you only notice once someone fixes it. And there's a foreground-permission refresh too, so extension commands now properly bring their windows forward when you switch back to them.
Keep in mind that this all still lives in the Preview build. If you want these in your daily driver, you'll need to opt into the channel, which means occasionally chasing bugs before Microsoft ironing them out.
Workspaces gets a guardrail for admin apps
The more interesting story here, honestly, is the security hardening around Workspaces. Before launching an EXE configured to "Run as administrator" where the digital signature can't be verified, PowerToys now shows a warning. You get two choices: skip the app entirely, or run it anyway as a one-time exception.
LegendaryBlair, who also authored this release, built the change. It's a targeted guardrail against untrusted elevated programs, and it fits a wider trend of open-source tools adding guardrails around privilege escalation. Not cheap to dismiss — giving users a real decision point rather than silently elevating something is a reasonable move.
The misc fixes you won't miss but will appreciate
The rest of the build is where community contributions really show. Peek had a regression that broke scrolling and text interaction inside previews; that's now restored, and it gained Alt+Left / Alt+Right file navigation while you're previewing. If you live in Peek, you'll feel that one.
The environment variables editor can now detect and remove duplicate PATH entries, including equivalents that differ only in how they're spelled. And the shortcut editor stops flickering when you hold down a key while capturing a shortcut.
Two fixes quietly underscore the headache of localizing software used worldwide. There's a CJK crash fix that resolves WinUI startup crashes in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean environments, plus a Turkish-locale temperature bug in PowerToys Run where the locale's treatment of the letter "I" scrambled the Celsius and Fahrenheit conversions. That's a classic i18n trap, and one that would've driven Turkish users crazy.
Download
Four installer variants are available, split by per-user versus machine-wide install and by x64 versus ARM64. The per-user x64 build is clearly the favorite by the numbers, pulling ahead of the others in early download counts.
Head here for the full release notes, the installers, and the hashes.
