PowerToys Preview lands with a Quick Access Shelf and Copilot key launch
PowerToys Preview v0.101.2712.0 shipped September 30, and once again the Command Palette does the heavy lifting. New additions include a Quick Access Shelf, Copilot key launching, copyable deep links, and a Win+Alt+J Dock shortcut.
Microsoft's PowerToys Preview v0.101.2712.0 went live today. Maintainer LegendaryBlair pushed the build with four days' worth of fixes and features since the previous Preview. On the headline side you get a Quick Access Shelf, the ability to launch the palette from the Copilot key, copyable deep links, and a new Win+Alt+J shortcut for the Dock.
PowerToys has quietly become the first thing a lot of power users install on a fresh machine. The free, MIT-licensed suite now sits at roughly 139,000 GitHub stars with over 8,600 forks, and it packs more than 30 utilities into a single download. FancyZones, Shortcut Guide, Color Picker, PowerRename, the Command Palette itself. Microsoft keeps the source out in the open instead of folding everything into Windows proper, and that's partly what keeps it relevant.
This preview builds directly on v0.101.2684.0, which arrived September 26 and had already put the Command Palette front and center. Read them back to back and the direction gets clear fast.
The Command Palette eats the whole update
It's fair to say the Command Palette is basically this entire release, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The palette is the flagship feature, and this version does real work around it.
The biggest visible addition is an opt-in Quick Access Shelf, a prototype that shows pinned commands in a slim, collapsed bar rather than forcing you to open the full palette every time. There's an overflow menu for commands that don't fit, plus Alt+number shortcuts for instant launch. It ships as experimental so the team can gather feedback first, so don't expect it to harden into anything permanent overnight. Jiří Polásek, the project's primary Command Palette developer, put it together in PR #49915.
Also new is the ability to assign the Copilot key to launch the Command Palette through Windows Settings. It's a slightly odd turn of events, honestly — seeing Microsoft's own AI key repurposed to fire up a free third-party search box. Copy a deep link to any setting or extension option and the target now automatically expands, scrolls to it, and highlights itself. Small touches, but the sort you'll feel the moment you actually use them.
The Dock got attention too. That's the persistent, multi-monitor command panel, and this update adds a Win+Alt+J hotkey to reveal and focus it. The shortcut only registers while the Dock is enabled, so you aren't tying up a global key when the feature is off. Layouts also survive Miracast reconnects, monitor renumbering, port changes, and system resume. If you've ever watched your Dock scatter after a laptop lid close, this is exactly the kind of fix that matters.
A large chunk of the rest went into the icon-rendering pipeline. Stale icons in recycled rows, redundant refreshes, and general UI churn got the sort of teardown that's boring to describe but makes the palette feel far less jittery. Opt-in diagnostics ride along to measure cache activity, though they're disabled during normal use to avoid a performance hit. Navigation fixes rounded it out: pointer versus keyboard tracking, persisted fallback defaults, and a cleanup of duplicate context-action calls.
The other utility changes are smaller. Mouse Jump got a fix for its undersized Settings preview (PR #50489, from @mikeclayton), and the community-built GoogleTranslate plugin finally made it onto the documented third-party list for PowerToys Run. Developers saw internal hardening as well, from clipboard helpers in the extension toolkit to a FancyZones editor fix.
Installation is a four-way affair, covering per-user and machine-wide installs across x64 and ARM64, each shipped with a SHA-256 hash so you can verify what you downloaded. Grab the installers from the GitHub releases page, or go straight through WinGet, the Microsoft Store, Chocolatey, or Scoop. The exact filenames and hashes are on the release tag, so head there if you want to verify before installing.
For what it's worth, the pace is the real story here. Two previews, about four days apart, both heavily weighted toward the Command Palette. Microsoft has already pointed ahead to v0.102, which calls for modernizing several utilities with WinUI 3 and adding tabs plus JavaScript or TypeScript extension support to the palette. The Quick Access Shelf and the Dock work in this preview read like the early scaffolding for that more extensible, multi-window experience.
Most users can wait for a stable build. But if you live in the Command Palette and run a genuinely messy multi-monitor desk, this preview is worth a look before these features reach the mainline.
Head here to the Github release page.
