Mark Disabled "Toys" in the settings list

[nurbles]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

It would be nice if I could see at a glance which of the PowerToys I have enabled/disabled in the list at the left side of the settings screen. I thought I saw that when a few of the things I have disabled were shown with what appeared to be greyed-out icons, but apparently that is just the color of their icons.

I'm picturing a simple mark over the icon for a toy that is disabled. For example, the classic red circle with a line through it, perhaps, or maybe just a simple X over the disable icons.

I considered also requesting a mark showing newly added tools, but realized that could be problematic, since my PowerToys was updated twice this morning, within a couple minutes. (First to 0.49.0, then immediately to 0.49.1) So, after the second update, is anything from the first update still "new"?

Scenario when this would be used?

After every update I must look at the settings for every single PowerToy to ensure that none of the things I prefer disabled have been activated and to see if there have been new PowerToys added that I need to configure or would prefer to disable.

(I know, I probably don't need to do this, but I continue to have bad experiences with various Microsoft updates changing my settings and no longer trust any updates,)

Supporting information

No response

[crutkas]

could grey out the color icon but few icons are very grey scale based ...

[ppizarror]

The same feature is present in vs code with extensions. The disabled ones are pushed to the bottom of the list, in a dimmed gray.

[nurbles]

Just a thought: Perhaps push the disable to the bottom and add a separator/header that indicates the lower list is of disable power toys?

[nurbles]

Since it has been nine months with no activity here...

I have recently been wishing that the list of PowerToys included the actual master On/Off button for each tool. That would certainly show which tools are enabled and which are not. For tools with multiple subfunctions that may be enabled separately, I'd suggest either showing the On/Off control grayed when a toys is partially on and off or use a different control graphic for those...perhaps a sort of three-position switch or something.

After 15 months, it is still quite annoying to need to visit every toy in settings to ensure the correct (for me) ones are on and off.

On a related note, sometimes it isn't easy to notice when a new toys was added, especially if (for whatever reason) it was added in an update that was skipped locally, but it is still new to my local installation. Is there already a request for this to be highlighted in the PowerToy list, too?

[crutkas]

@nurbles, we never committed to this work item. We are currently focused on other large work items. I know we have to revisit the left nav soon.

New utilities are always listed in a "highlighted" (top section)

We also have the quick launch via systray that does show what is enabled

[nurbles]

I realize that no one ever commited to working on this item, I just though a new comment every nine months wasn't an excessive amount of reminders that some of us would love to see this.

The "quick" launch was well hidden (from me), since there is nothing named "quick launch" on the tray icon's context menu. I found it by (left)clicking on the tray item and discovering that, unlike all other tray icons I have, it neither launches the app nor displays the context menu, but does something unique -- which is NOT yet the quick launch menu, but some sort of pre-cursor thing where I needed to click on a "More" button to see the quick launch menu. I'm guessing "quick launch" is a temporary name until something meaningful can be conjured, since the "quick launch" menu does not actually launch anything -- it is more of a quick enable/disable menu. It is also not at all quick as it takes just about the same amount of time to get to it as it does to launch the settings app itself.

But again, this just just a nine month poke to make sure this is remembered, since it has still not made it beyond "New" status (which to me means that no one has actually looked at it yet.)

[nurbles]

I just discovered the new dashboard that almost accomplishes this request. It is a good compromise to adding the enable sliders to the list on the left, by adding the ability to see sub-tools (?) [e.g. the various Mouse Utilities are listed separately in the dashboard].

Now, if we could have an option to make the Dashboard the default screen to show when we open PowerToys settings, that'd be close to perfect. :-) Thanks!

[crutkas]

Dashboard system now clearly does this. I do not think we'll every disable the left hand side cause it forces a "clicking it won't work due to visually being not enabled"

Without a real world example also that does this style, i don't think we'd do this.

[nurbles]

The dashboard system seems to be a complete replacement for the left hand side, so why keep the left hand side at all?

OTOH... with the left hand side always visible, if it had indicators like the dashboard (but showing three states: off, partly on, fully on) we wouldn't need to keep going back to the dashboard (or checking every tool) to find what is active.

The need to see someone else do it first is interesting... it seems to show a fear to innovate and rather a desire to copy. But that's just my opinion.

Oh well. I give up. This will be my final comment on this matter unless someone specifically asks me something.