Hands-On Windows 207: Elevate Your Workflow

0:00I'm going to get me next on hands on Windows. We're going to take a look at some advanced settings that will be of interest to power users, developers, or anyone who wants to be a power user. This episode is brought to you by Trusted Tech. You know, Trusted Tech is reviewed more than $800 million in Microsoft 365 licensing spend and returned over $100 million to client budgets. On average, that's about 12% of every Microsoft 365 dollar going to waste. And licensing waste doesn't stay small. Left unmanaged licensing drift grows 3 to 7% a year. And Microsoft's newer contracts can lock you in for years. Trusted Tech's free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation at trustedtech.team slash twitch shows you exactly where you're overspending and how to fix it before your next renewal. Locks it in. It's not just numbers on a page. Sensky services runs pest control and long care crews across the country.

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2:03This is twitch. Hello everybody and welcome back to hands on Windows on Palfa Rod and this week we're going to look at some I'm going to call these power user features. Some of these things are considered to be developer features that are not all developer features. Microsoft at some point had created a developer options page in the settings app in Windows 11. Now they have an advanced settings page which we'll look at in a moment. But when I think about what does it mean to be a power user? What does that even mean? I mean I think in a system like Windows I think learning a lot of the common keyboard shortcuts is kind of a good first step. If you are not comfortable with the command line, strong recommend that you spend some time doing that. I'm actually a I'm in the terminal app all the time. This we did an episode about this sometime where I think I'm back in the spring but there's all these configurable features in here. It's rather incredible.

3:03And I use this exclusively to install apps now. Right. So when I bring up a new computer, I'll bring up I actually I don't have the search but I know you know the first thing I do is install say Google dry which is already on this computer. So I'm not going to go through with the Saturday. Know what to type and then from there I get all of the files I have that include all kinds of things but one of those things is the command lines that I need. Let me get back to the right place for all the apps I want to install right. And so this file here is just a list of the WINGET commands I used to install whatever apps I use all the time. Right. So super convenient. I kind of just take it from there and I some form of even something as simple as you know obviously you can do a directory but there's some Linux commands built in. There's some CLI tools you can download from Microsoft. They're really cool. I think we did. In fact, no, we did definitely do an episode about the command line edit text editor which is a kind of an incredible

4:07thing. I add it to my right-click menu. So if I want to open what am I opening here? Yeah. This is the file I just showed you but open in a full screen command line based editor. You know, really cool. Like it's there's just a lot of things built in. You can install the subsystem for Linux, install Ubuntu or Debian or whatever distribution want. Learn that environment. You can run Linux graphic applications and so forth. This is a lot of stuff. But if you're not ready for any that, the one thing you should look at and I think this is the one thing anyone should look at. Even if you don't desire to be a power user, there's some really useful features in here. So if you go to the settings app and go to System, you will see this advanced page. And this is new to this past year. Like I said, it used to be a developer options page or somewhere else. It was in a different location. But they've pulled a bunch of tools in here. At least some of which

5:12would be I think will be useful to everybody. In fact, the one here at the top will get to first. I think it's universally applicable. But depending on your needs, there's some very interesting things in here. So we will take a look at probably the top five or six of these in just a moment. But let's take a quick break. Hey, Paul. Hey, everybody. This episode of Hands on Windows brought to you by BitWordin. They trusted later in past key, past word and secrets management with more than 15 million users across 180 countries and over 80,000 businesses. BitWordin helps individuals and organizations protect their digital lives with trusted open source security. BitWordin believes everyone should have access to strong security. That's why they offer a basic free past word manager free forever for individuals as well as paid plans like the one I have family plan. There's also a team's plan and for your business enterprise plans as well. Getting started is easier than ever with BitWordin. They have a new direct import option that moves your existing

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7:16for free across all devices as an individual user at bitwarden.com slash twit. I love it. I use it. You should do bitwarden.com slash twit. Now back to hands on Windows. So end task. This is awesome. Right. So you have an app. Maybe it crashed its hung whatever it is. It's kind of faded. I'll have to kind of emulate this. In the past what you would do, there were different things you could do actually but you would typically go here find the thing and you can see actually what just happened is one of the problems with this thing right because this display it animates. In other words those things kind of move around based on CPU memory usage etc. So sometimes you go to right click this thing and choose end task but you've right clicked the wrong thing which by the way almost just did right because helium in this case in no pad actually just switched positions. So that's the type that's one of the problems. You can pause it. You hold down the shift key and it pauses but why not just make this easier right. So when you enable this option what you get

8:19is that you right click the icon for the app in the task bar. Let me do that again and task is right here and so this kills this instantly. It's nice. It's exactly like the task manager feature but a lot more accessible and discoverable. So that's absolutely one I think just would apply to just about everybody. The other one I think a lot of people are going to want to look at is the file explorer options right. Now if you are familiar with file explorer a couple things you will notice you know to go into folder options here you know that this thing is bright white even though this thing is dark mode right so that's one of the many little fit and finishings that Microsoft is working on. So sometime in the next several months this will actually be fixed but for today we're stuck with this thing and you can go into the view tab and I can't really get that out of the way but a lot of the options you see are some of the no all of the options you see here are here but they're in here somewhere you have to kind of like hide empty drive is one of them hide extensions

9:19for no file types etc. So this is just a simpler UI for that kind of stuff if you want to enable any of these things it's not the full set of features you can configure in file explorer but it's kind of the top five I'll call it here right. The other one and this is this is very special use case if you're a developer or in my case I'm a writer and so I'm actually using this tool for that reason you might be using get which is a command line tool for for doing version control right so in my case I'm doing a version control for documents but you do it for code projects and so forth and what you do is you might have to install an update from the store the first time you run this I've already done this but I have all the books I'm working on in here each one of these is a project up and get up so you know get control I've already done this one so it's going to return all spring and select the folder and it adds it to the list right and so I've done it already for the windows 11 field guide I've done it for the markdown field guide that I'm working on right now

10:20and so why would you do this well when I go in here in file explorer and I'll go into the mark that one because I've been working on this recently you get these additional bits of information through these columns right and these only appear in a folder that holds something related to get like a get project right so version status last change date and last change message now the last change message this is kind of a my my problem that this test get published thing is that just the boilerplate text I always just apply to these update which is just stupid but the nice thing about the reason this is so nice and it's not really obvious in this particular view because this is a very simple project it only has a few files but when I was doing the windows 11 field guide update which is hundreds of files I had a really hard time of understanding which I had updated which I didn't I had to go in and out and out and this is a way right from here just to see what the status is now if I was using good commit messages which I'm not for the most part this one was auto generated but that's useful information right it's really

11:26cool right so if I just go to a folder like this you don't see that here but when I go into books and then I just added eternal spring I don't think there's going to be much in there but yeah you can see it's been a while so you can see again you can see I just use that boilerplate on everything which is so stupid but you know going to image files as well like if I go into this folder you can see when the these in this case images when they were updated right and if I used a good commit message which you know again I do not that would provide even more information so to me that's super useful if you're not a developer if you don't use git I mean yes that's not the as usual a couple of things related to the command line we were just talking about that right the first one is by default it this is set to let windows decide so it could use the console host which is the old command line environment the one that's like MS-DOS or it could use Windows terminal which is the modern command line environment which hosts multiple command line interfaces of CLIs right including power shell by default I always set this to Windows terminal I only want

12:30Windows terminal that's the only thing I want running I configure Windows terminal very specifically so that's nice and then these two here that are related to it so this is one you should not leave on and will not typically need to turn on but every once in a while you have to run a power shell script it requires privileges that windows is configured not to allow by default and you can enable this option to let those things run and the way you should do this is go into the command line turn this on do whatever you're going to do that's maybe potentially dangerous and when you're done turn this thing back off the other way to do this is a command line there's a power shell command that or skill poetic I guess that also does this is I don't remember it off the top I had to always have to google it this just lets you do it very quickly and easily so one real world example of where you would use this is it we talked about tiny 11 builders an amazing command line tool for creating a custom version of the windows 11 setup media it requires you to turn

13:33this thing on first before you can use it right so you can enable this run tiny 11 builder make your usb key when you're done turn it off so that's cool and then the third one here is pseudo so if you're familiar with unix or Linux you might know that pseudo pseudo is the way that you escalate privileges on a per command basis it's a little more complicated than that's kind of a it's actually kind of on a timer but essentially speaking you know you have to elevate right so every once in a while you'll type in a command line it will say you don't have permissions for that because in Linux unlike windows you're actually it actually is restricted by default so then you're like okay well then you type in well pseudo space and then whatever the command was you were doing again then it asked you for your password and you can get through that so that's not the way windows works right by default if you run terminal like this or any any of the console hosts this thing is running with well it's running with what I'm going to call admin user privileges although there are some

14:33protections built in it doesn't have system level admin privilege etc but you can it could because I'm an admin I should say but you can right click and then run as admin right and so if I know I'm going to do something a little you know screw you're dangerous or whatever like I'll do that I often do it just to install apps it's a little bit easier I don't have to you know if I do when get install whatever the app name is right if I do silent and I'm not in an admin windows term our terminal environment I will get uac prompts for every one of the installs I do but if it's an admin one you can see from the shield and I add silent now it just skips out so it doesn't it just hides them you don't have to worry about any of the uac stuff so this is kind of a nice city but if you're using the command line a lot instead the problem is that commit that terminal sitting there with admin privileges you know you have to remember to go in and out and close it and so forth and so you can enable pseudo and when you do that it works a little bit

15:36you know mostly like it doesn't link to Unix but it is per command by defaultable open in a window you can actually do it just in line which is the Unix way but it will only be for that one command so if you're going to do with the win get thing like I said like I don't I just killed it but I could go in here and say you know pseudo win get and then yada yada so it will prompt you for your password which is not great but if you're you know this is familiar to you it's kind of a kind of an interesting call back to you know the Unix days or whatever if that's what you're doing your Linux that's fine if you're really into this stuff there's also something called curiutils which you can download from get hub that will add even more Linux commands this some stuff built in the windows but you can get the whole you know set of the most bash commands now in windows which is really cool so yeah we did the terminal one and then yeah I guess that's actually most of it so n task for everybody the file explorer stuff I think everyone should look at if

16:38you using get get to turn this thing on that's amazing you know the windows terminal stuff the three things I mean if you're in the command line at all this is something you need to pay attention to in addition to all of the terminal customization stuff which we talked a little bit about it is a whole world that you can write a whole book on that thing but there's a lot going on there and then beyond that there are the actual developer tools so I'm not going to get into the pure developer stuff developer mode if you're writing modern apps windows love and this has to be enabled you can create a dev drive which uses the r a fs file system which is actually super performant that's interesting I'm kind of surprised they don't let you just kind of do this for everybody I mean I can imagine you know people who are doing like Photoshop or video I think wanting to have what is essentially a dev drive I'm just for the performance enhancements but not yet so maybe someday we'll get to that and then you can also create VH virtual harddives of various formats

17:43and then attach it to your computer as if it were a physical drive and I'm not going to do that here but you know fuse hyper V or if you use the windows sandbox those things are creating or can't create do create virtual machines like this is a way to create one of those drives like outside of that environment so kind of a software based drive this is these are actual drives like this is on a USB key but they will appear this when you attach it you're essentially assigning it a drive later and appears like a drive right so there's all these developer things but again I don't I don't spend too much time with that but I feel like most people a do not know this interface exists and be look at it like you know this looks kind of complicated I don't know but there's definitely things in here that I think almost anybody could find useful so hopefully you have so thank you for watching we'll have a new episode of hands on windows every Thursday you can find out more

18:45about the podcast at twit.tv slash h ow thank you for watching again thank you especially to our club twit members we love you if you are not a club twit member you can learn more about that program at twit.tv slash club twit thank you see you next week hi there Leo Laporte here I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this app keep probably already know about this week in tech every Sunday I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories it's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this week in tech just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe this week in tech from the twit network it's football season and you can now get almost anything you need for

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