PowerToys Preview v0.102.2911.0 ships a Command Palette keyboard rewrite and Image Resizer fixes
The latest preview, out today, swaps a C++ keyboard service for a managed listener and fixes how the tool handles TIFF files and JPEG XR output.
Microsoft PowerToys Preview v0.102.2911.0 is live on GitHub now. Released today by collaborator Boliang Zhang, the build quietly swaps out a keyboard service for Command Palette and fixes a stack of image bugs in Image Resizer.
There's a nuance you should catch before hitting download. The release is tagged a prerelease on GitHub, but Microsoft deliberately has it ride the stable update channel. Stable-channel users will see it without needing to switch tracks. The notes are clear that this is still just a candidate for the full 0.102 release, built from stable with "stable-release intent," not the finished thing.
Keep in mind that this matters mostly for how you install it, not what you get. The changelog runs since the previous preview, v0.102.2883.0 from October 16. That's the standard practice here: each preview documents only what moved, not the whole 0.102 story.
A keyboard overhaul you won't see, but will feel
The biggest change sits inside Command Palette, the fuzzy-finder that PowerToys also calls PowerToys Run. It used to lean on a separate C++ project called CmdPalKeyboardService to grab global keyboard input. This build tosses that standalone service and replaces it with a managed C# class called GlobalKeyboardListener, built on the Windows low-level keyboard hook.
The work comes from contributor Jiří Polášek. It closes issue #50973, adds startup-error reporting, and brings regression coverage for shortcut handling. Reviewers Michael Jolley and Mike Griese signed off on it. One noted the new code uses "a safe handle that knows how to unhook itself when disposed," which keeps lifecycle management from getting messy.
Why it matters in plain terms: fewer cross-language moving parts means the global hotkey that wakes Command Palette is more reliable, and the code is far easier to test. You won't notice the change on a good day. You'll definitely notice it on a bad one.
Image Resizer gets its act together
On the practical side, Image Resizer landed a genuine correctness fix. Before this build the tool ignored PNG interlacing and TIFF compression settings, resized only the first page of a multi-page TIFF, dropped JPEG author and title fields, and silently fell back to PNG when you asked for JPEG XR output. That last part is exactly the kind of thing that bites photographers and anyone running batch jobs.
The fix comes from contributor Yu Leng, who worked from a Microsoft Dev Box. It uses a fresh encoder when the options call for it, processes every TIFF page independently, preserves 16-bit precision, and maps the old WMPhoto setting back to JPEG XR instead of bailing to PNG.
The PR reports 304 tests passed, zero failed, zero skipped. No new dependencies, no schema changes, nothing under the hood that you'd have to reinstall.
Supporting changes show up across a handful of utilities. PowerRename now handles EXIF GPS coordinates and XMP author tokens in filename templates, including correctly ordered lists of multiple creators. Color Picker keeps adjusted and similar-color picks within your history limit while pinning the currently selected color first. The Settings welcome animation got a trim, with subtle theme-aware tile highlights, a removed top-edge gap during parallax, and softer light trails. The Command Palette dock also picks up a right-click menu plus batched rebuilds, which should keep it from rebuilding itself on every monitor.
That's a lot of under-the-hood tuning for what is a free utility. It's arguably one of the more honest previews Microsoft has shipped in a while: most of the work is invisible, but it's the stuff that prevents the tools from quietly breaking.
Why two weeks and six previews?
The 0.102 release train actually started October 8 with v0.102.2803.0. In about two weeks Microsoft shipped six previews. That kind of pace is aggressive, and the repository now sits at roughly 139K stars largely because an active external community is churning through pull requests alongside Microsoft staff.
Across 0.102 so far, Microsoft has rolled out Mouse Button Lock, a Light Switch CLI, a Settings CLI, and replaced welcome-page GIFs with muted looping H.264 videos. The broader roadmap points toward WinUI 3 modernization and a Command Palette that will gain tabs plus JavaScript and TypeScript extension support.
The build ships four installers, covering both scopes and architectures. You get per-user and machine-wide versions in both x64 and ARM64, each with a SHA-256 hash so you can verify integrity before running anything.
If you'd rather not hand-compute a hash, the Microsoft Store, WinGet, Chocolatey, and Scoop all carry PowerToys. WinGet respects your current scope: run winget install Microsoft.PowerToys -s winget for a user install, or add --scope machine for a machine-wide one. You can also flip between the stable and preview channels inside the PowerToys Settings app.
The release page is already showing early thumbs-up and rocket reactions from users. Grab the installers from the PowerToys GitHub releases page.
