Have you ever wanted Windows 11 to automatically switch between light and dark modes based on a schedule, or help you find keyboard shortcut conflicts? Well, Microsoft is about to solve both of these missing Windows features with PowerToys.
The latest 0.94 release of PowerToys, the useful addons for Windows power users, includes a new shortcut conflicts feature that can detect what shortcuts are currently in use by Windows or PowerToys modules. There are so many PowerToys to choose from now that it’s easy to create a conflict and have two things happen at once when you activate a keyboard shortcut. Any conflicts will be highlighted in red in this conflicts tool, so you can reassign them quickly.
Microsoft is also working on addressing another big missing Windows 11 feature with a PowerToy module. “We are planning some nice new features and improvements for next month – a revamped Keyboard Manager UI, and a new utility that can automatically switch between light and dark mode based on your schedule,” says Niels Laute, a senior product manager at Microsoft.
While you can manually enable light or dark modes in Windows 11, there’s no way to schedule these automatically based on your schedule or on sunrise and sunset times. It’s a basic feature that’s been part of iOS and Android for years, and I’m surprised Microsoft has had to create a PowerToy for this instead of this being natively part of Windows 11. Either way, it’s arriving next month so if you like to switch between themes on Windows 11 then you won’t have to do it manually anymore.
If you haven’t checked out PowerToys before there are plenty of other useful utilities like Advanced Paste, Always on Top, FancyZones, and the new Spotlight-like Command Palette launcher app. You can download the latest PowerToys release over on Microsoft’s GitHub page.
