More great Windows software

I’m moving from macOS to Windows for my work computer, while I use Windows personally with my gaming systems and have used Windows for years, on an average day I was using macOS more than Windows. There are things I wanted to improve about my Windows experience.

Not only this, but I’ve also recently built a new desktop gaming PC and have also installed a lot of this software on there too!

QuickLook

Free

Download / Info: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/quicklook/9nv4bs3l1h4s?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

I love Quick Look on macOS. It was so handy being able to select a file, press space and get a preview of that file. Windows doesn’t have anything like that natively, but thankfully QuickLook solves that!

StartAllBack

30 day trial, $4.99 single PC license

Download / Info: https://www.startallback.com/

I upgraded my personal laptop to Windows 11 to see what it’s like.

So far, Windows 11 has been buggy, unreliable and a bit of a pain. Some things I liked (such as T-Clock from the “Invisibly good Windows software” blog post I wrote) didn’t work.

StartAllBack allows customisation of the start menu, task bar and notification area. It also enables T-Clock to work again! I can have my small icons, customised clock and a cleaner looking start menu.

PowerToys

Free

Download / Info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

The thing I use most in PowerToys is FancyZones. This allows me to configure each of my monitors to have a layout that I can arrange application windows into with the use of a shortcut key while dragging them.

It also includes PowerToys Run which is a bit like macOS’s spotlight feature and I use it a lot to launch apps without my hands leaving the keyboard.

WSLGit

Free

Download / Info: https://github.com/andy-5/wslgit

This one is a bit dev specific, but I use Git Fork as my git gui of choice (something I’ve only done recently) and I do my dev work inside WSL2. I wanted Fork to use the version of Git inside WSL, and this allows it to do just that!