PowerToys Preview v0.101.2652.0 Ships with Fixes to Command Palette, Window Hopper, and More
Microsoft has pushed another PowerToys preview build. Preview v0.101.2652.0 landed on GitHub today, polishing the Command Palette and Window Hopper while fixing real stability bugs across nearly every utility in the suite.
It's the latest drop in a blistering stream of Insider builds that began with the major v0.101 release on August 25. Individually, these preview releases read like a changelog. Taken together, they're what actually pushes the project forward.
PowerToys remains free and open source under the MIT License, and the project now sits at roughly 139,000 stars on GitHub. The build targets both x64 and ARM64, and ships both "per user" and machine-wide installers, so it reaches personal machines and managed enterprise deployments alike.
The changes you'll notice
The release notes flag eight headline fixes, one per major utility. Command Palette gets the lion's share, which surprises no one who's watched this project.
Microsoft hid a redundant "More" button that only showed up when there was nothing left to overflow. The Ctrl+K context menus are preserved, and keyboard navigation across shortcuts and submenus got tidied up. Two other Command Palette fixes are more about reliability than looks. One stops a broken third-party extension from jamming the event listeners, so a single bad extension can no longer drag down the whole overlay. The other lets Window Walker see owned taskbar windows, meaning LabVIEW project windows and similar nested app windows finally surface in search.
Keep in mind that Window Hopper is getting polished harder than almost anything else, and for good reason. It's the newest tool in the suite, cycling through the windows of the app you're already using like Alt+Tab, but locked to your current window. Press Alt + backtick and you're jumping between browser tabs, terminals, and File Explorer windows without leaving the app.
This build trims preview memory usage, restores click-through on transparent overlay areas, adds a thumbnail fallback when a snapshot fails to capture, and fixes an opaque page-indicator bar. The tool is still young, so these are the kind of tweaks that separate "functional" from "pleasing to use."
The smaller fixes hit real pain points. Environment Variables used to crash on startup when Windows runs under a UTF-8 system code page, a setup common across many Asian-language locales. That's now fixed, alongside a decoding issue in environment-change notifications. Keyboard Manager refuses to let you remap Win+L with extra modifiers attached. Win+L locks the workstation, and PowerToys correctly declines to build a key assignment Windows itself would reject. A validation error beats a stuck key combo every time.
Screen Ruler got better bounds detection at the very first pixel row and column. One thing to flag: if you came up from an older build, you may need to reselect "Device-independent pixels" as your secondary unit, since it stopped saving correctly.
Building the thing, and where this fits
Not everything in a release touches something you can see. Two changes quietly simplify how contributors set up their workspaces and automate issue triage, while the localization pipelines got updated with service-ownership metadata so the multi-language submission flow stays healthy. A few defensive touches made the Settings backend less likely to crack after initialization.
The team behind this one was published by Microsoft release engineer @LegendaryBlair, with code from a blend of Microsoft staff and community contributors. @jiripolasek landed three fixes this cycle, all in Command Palette, and sits in the repository's top-10 contributors with roughly 315 total. @daverayment contributed two, and a handful of others.
If you're keeping score, September alone has been a blur. This build follows v0.101.2632.0 from September 21, which brought copyable command deep links and a PATH duplicate-removal fix. Earlier in the month added Grab And Move responsiveness tweaks on the 18th and a Mouse Utilities "Auto Hide Cursor" on the 15th. In the months since the v0.101 generation launched, the release cadence has been relentless. It's arguably the fastest-moving part of the Windows ecosystem, though the constant churn isn't for everyone.
The whole 0.101 line grew out of the major v0.101.2362.0 launch on August 25, which introduced Window Hopper, a redesigned update experience with separate Stable and Insider channels, compact mode for the Command Palette, a WinUI 3 refresh of Quick Accent and Mouse Jump, linked brightness sliders for Power Display, and Advanced Paste running local Phi Silica AI on-device. Taken together, that generation is PowerToys' steady migration to the WinUI 3 / Windows App SDK stack, with a growing appetite for local AI and flexible update channels.
Grab it
The release is up on the GitHub releases page right now. Four installers ship: per user and machine-wide, each in x64 and ARM64, plus group policy files and symbol packages for enterprise and debugging work.
Head here to download the release. Those already on the Insider channel get this automatically; Stable users will see these changes mature into a later release. Not a feature bombshell, but if you use PowerToys at all, it's worth the two minutes.
