Hands-On Windows 207 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up 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. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands On Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott, and this week we're going to look at some— I'm going to call these power user features. And some of these things are considered to be developer features. They're not all developer features.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:37]:
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, you know, 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 in, I'm in the Terminal app all the time. This, we did an episode about this sometime earlier, I think back in the spring, but there's all these configurable features in here. It's rather incredible. And 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 to search, but I know, you know, the first thing I do is install, say, Google Drive, which is already on there.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:30]:
computer, so I'm not going to go through this. I already 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 this— 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 use 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 that are really cool. I think we did, in fact, no, we did definitely do an episode about the command line edit text editor, which is kind of an incredible thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:20]:
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. Uh, but open in a full-screen command line, uh, based, uh, uh, editor, you know, really cool. Like it's, uh, there's just a lot of, um, things built in. You can install the subsystem for Linux, install Ubuntu or Debian or whatever distribution you want. Um, learn that environment. You can run Linux, uh, graphical applications and so forth. There's just a lot of stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:50]:
Um, but if you're not ready for any of that, um, 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 into 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— it was like 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 would be, I think will be useful to everybody. In fact, the one here at the top we'll get to first, I think is universally applicable, but depending on your needs, there's some very interesting things in here. So, so end task. Um, this is awesome, right? So you have an app, maybe it crashed, it's hung, whatever it is, you know, it's kind of faded.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:41]:
Um, I'll have to kind of emulate this. Um, in the past, what you would do, uh, there are 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 animates. In other words, those things kind of move around based on CPU memory usage, et cetera. 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, I almost just did, right? Because Helium, in this case, and Notepad actually just switched positions. So that's the type of— that's one of the problems. You can pause it, hold down the Shift key and it pauses. But But why not just make this easier, right? So when you enable this option, what you get is that you right-click the icon for the app in the taskbar.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:28]:
Let me do that again. And end 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 finish things that Microsoft is working on.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:03]:
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 for no file types, et cetera. 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, uh, in File Explorer, but it's kind of the top 5, I'll call it here. Right. Um, the other one, and this is good, this is very special use case.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:42]:
Um, if you, 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 Git, which is a command line tool for, um, for doing version control, right? So in my case, I'm doing a version control for documents, but you could 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 in GitHub. So, you know, Git control.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:13]:
Um, I've already done this one, so I'll just go into Returnal Spring and select the folder and it adds it to this 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. And so why would you do this? Well, when I go in here in File Explorer and I'll go into the Markdown one, 'cause I've been working on this recently, um, you get these additional, um, bits of information through these columns, right? And these only appear in a folder that holds something related to Git, like a Git project, right? So version status, last change date, and last change message. Now the last change message, this is kind of a— my problem that this test Git publish thing is that just the boilerplate text I always just apply to these updates, 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 understanding which I had updated and which I didn't. I'd have to go in and out and out. And this is a way right from here just to see what the status is.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:20]:
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 cool, 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, you can go into 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 going to be as useful.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:07]:
A couple of things related to the command line. We were just talking about that, right? The first one is by default, 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 or CLIs, right? Including PowerShell by default. I always set this to Windows Terminal. I only want Windows Terminal. That's the only thing I want running. I configure Windows Terminal very specifically, so that's nice. And then these 2 here that are related to it.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:42]:
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 PowerShell script that 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, Um, turn this on, do whatever you're going to do that's maybe potentially dangerous. And then when you're done, turn this thing back off. Um, the other way to do this is a command line. There's a PowerShell, uh, cmdlet that, or scriptlet, I guess, that, um, also does this. I don't remember it off the top of my head. I always have to Google it. Um, this just lets you do it, uh, very quickly and easily.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:23]:
So one real-world example of where you would use this is that we talked about Tiny 11 Builder is an amazing command line tool for creating a custom version of the Windows 11 setup media. It requires you to turn this thing on first before you can use it, right? So you could 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 sudo. So if you're familiar with Unix or Linux, you might know that sudo is the way that you escalate privileges on a per-command basis. It's a little more complicated than that. It's actually kind of on a timer, but Um, essentially speaking, um, you know, you have to elevate, right? So every once in a while you'll type in a command line, it will say, oh, you don't have permissions for that because in Linux, unlike Windows, um, you're actually, it actually is restricted by default.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:12]:
So then you're like, okay, well then you type in, well, sudo space, and then whatever the command was you were doing again, then it asks you for your password and you can get through that. So that's not the way Windows works, right? Um, by default, if you run terminal like this or any, or any of the console hosts, um, this thing is running with Well, it's running with what I'm going to call admin user privileges, although there are some protections built in. It doesn't have system-level admin privilege, et cetera. But you can— 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, screwy or 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 winget, Um, install whatever the app name is, right? If I do silent and I'm not in an admin Windows, uh, term or terminal environment, I will get UAC prompts for every one of the installs I do. But if it's an admin one, as you can see from the shield, and I add silent, now it just skips those.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:20]:
It doesn't— it, it just hides them. You don't have to worry about any of the UAC stuff. So this is kind of a nicety. Um, but if you're using the command line a lot, instead, the problem is that commit, that terminal is 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 sudo. And when you do that, it works a little bit, you know, mostly like it does in Linux or Unix, but, uh, it is per command. Um, by default, it will open it in a window.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:46]:
You can actually do it just inline, which is the Unix way. Um, but it will only be for that one command. So if you're going to do it with the winget thing, like I said, like I don't, uh, I just killed it, but, um, I could go in here and say, you know, sudo winget and then yada, yada, yada. So, um, 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, um, uh, callback to, you know, the Unix days or whatever. If that's what you're doing on Linux, that's fine. Um, if you're really into this stuff, there's also something called curutils, uh, which you can download from, uh, download from, uh, GitHub that will add even more Linux commands. There's some stuff built into Windows, but you can get the whole you know, set of the most Bash commands, uh, now in Windows, which is really cool. Um, so yeah, we did the terminal one and then, uh, yeah, I guess that's actually most of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:36]:
So End Task, um, for everybody, the File Explorer stuff, I think everyone should look at. If you're using Git, you got to turn this thing on. That's amazing. Um, you know, the Windows Terminal stuff, uh, the 3 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. There's a whole world that you could 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.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:11]:
Developer mode, if you're writing modern apps for Windows 11, this has to be enabled. You can create a dev drive, which uses the ReFS file system, which is actually super performant. That's interesting. I'm kind of surprised they don't Uh, let you just kind of do this for everybody. I mean, I, I could imagine, you know, people who are doing, uh, like Photoshop or video editing wanting to have what is essentially a dev drive, um, just for the performance enhancements. But, um, not yet. So, you know, maybe someday we'll get to that. And then you can also create VH— uh, virtual hard drives of various formats and then attach it to your computer as if it were physical drive, and I'm not going to do that here, but, um, you know, if you use Hyper-V or if you use, uh, the Windows Sandbox, those things are creating or can create or, uh, do create, uh, virtual machines.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:06]:
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, uh, this, when you attach it, you're essentially assigning it a drive letter and it appears like a drive, right? So there's all these developer things, but again, I don't, I don't, we don't have to spend too much time with that. But, um, I feel like most people, A, do not know this interface exists, and B, look at it, well, you know, this looks kind of complicated. I don't know. But, um, there's definitely things in here that I think, um, almost anybody could find useful. So hopefully you have.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:43]:
So, um, thank you for watching. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the podcast at twit.tv/how. Um, 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/clubtwit. Thank you.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:05]:
I'll see you next week.