Windows on Arm users finally receive Native PowerToys

A full two years after the release of Surface Pro X, but they're ready for action

There was good news overnight for the niche of Windows on Arm users as Microsoft released a native Arm64 version of PowerToys.

PowerToys is an increasingly essential component for Windows users, with features ranging from assistance for keyboard shortcuts, though a nifty window manager to the very handy PowerToys Run function.

The first pre-release arrived on GitHub in 2019 and the PowerToys team has added functionality to the suite ever since (although, thankfully, not the TweakUI that blighted many a Windows system more than 20 years ago.)

Until now, a notable omission was native Arm64 support. The chipset showed up in recent versions, but v0.59 is the first to put all the pieces together. It has been a while coming – after all, Microsoft's Arm flagship, the Surface Pro X, was launched in 2019.

However, with Microsoft insisting it will bring tools such as Visual Studio to the architecture, it looks like there is life in Windows on Arm yet.

Aside from support for Arm64, the release continues the long running theme of incremental updates with up to four modifier keys for shortcuts in Keyboard Manager, WinUI 3 for Power Rename and an update to 1.1.0 for the Windows App SDK runtimes.

A raft of bugfixes is also present in the release, including issues dealt with in the Fancy Zones window manager, the Image Resizer and a problem in the File Explorer add-ons where modules depending on WebView2 were limited to files less than 2MB in size. Another fix in the Always on Top functionality dealt with borders hanging around when a window was minimized with Win+D.

The team plans to add an editor for environmental variables and a screen measure PowerToy in the future. The former is particularly interesting, especially when considering the limitations of Windows' current environment page.

The PowerToys suite can be obtained from its GitHub page, the Microsoft Store and via WinGet. ®