Today, Microsoft held a community call on YouTube to discuss various improvements for its development tools, such as Dev Drive, Dev Home, WSL, and more. During the live stream, Microsoft also demoed a new utility that will soon be added to PowerToys. It is called Workspaces, and it should be available in the next PowerToys update, version 0.84.
Demo"ed today in the Windows Developer Chat, PowerToys Workspaces coming in 0.84. (slides called it App Layouts). Create workspaces for each of your workflows and with a single click, get back to being productive with everything back to how you configured it.
— Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) August 15, 2024
Although the main focus of the presentation was on developers, every user who wants to save some time and clicks on repetitive tasks will appreciate the new utility.
In a nutshell, PowerToys Workspaces (called App Layouts in the Windows Dev Chat demo) allows you to create groups of applications, arrange them on the screen in a certain order, add some arguments or additional commands and then create a shortcut for launching them altogether.
For example, with just one click, you can launch Visual Studio on the left side of the screen, Terminal in the upper-right corner, and Microsoft Edge in the bottom-right corner of the screen. You will be able to create multiple workspaces and keep them on the desktop for quick access. Here is a demo of how this feature works:
PowerToys Workspaces will let you capture existing layouts with running apps, apps on different monitors, and even minimized applications. Moreover, you will be able to add CLI arguments, launch apps as Admin, specify window sizes, state, and more.
There is no information on when exactly PowerToys Workspaces will be available, but considering that the app receives updates quite often, the wait should not be too long. As usual, PowerToys 0.84 should also bring improvements for already existing modules and utilities.