PowerToys will now hold the mouse button down for you

Try selecting a long document while holding the left mouse button, or dragging a file across two monitors, with arthritic fingers or a hand that shakes. It is one of those small daily frictions nobody writes about. Microsoft's PowerToys 0.102, released on 21 October, adds Mouse Button Lock: press and hold a button for a moment, let go, and Windows keeps treating it as held until you click again. The drag continues without your finger. Microsoft lists accessibility alongside gaming and design work as the reason for building it, which is the right order.

The second new tool is CursorHide. It makes the pointer vanish while you are typing, or after the mouse has sat still for a while, and brings it straight back the moment you nudge it. Anyone who has lost a line of text behind a stray arrow will take to it quickly.

The rest of the release is for people who already live inside PowerToys. The Command Palette gained a shelf of pinned commands you fire with Alt and a number from 1 to 9, a search box for its own settings, and clock pins for several time zones at once. Keyboard Manager can now remap a key based on a tap alone, and its key picker is searchable, media keys included. ZoomIt will take a screenshot while you dictate a note onto it, transcribed on the device rather than in the cloud.

PowerToys is free and made by Microsoft, but fetch it from the Microsoft Store or the project's GitHub releases page rather than a search result. Copycat sites impersonating PowerToys have been handing out password stealers all year. Tendvane installs and updates apps through winget, Windows' own package manager, so what lands on your PC comes from a vetted source instead of whichever domain ranked first that day.