inside it, and then paste it into the field of your
choice (2). It isn’t magic: Text Extractor will
need fairly clear images in order to, um,
extract text, very much like Google’s Lens on
smartphones. But it’s undeniably handy for
those very specific situations.
Quick Accent from developer Damien
Leroy is also more or less an existing project
dropped into PowerToys, this time
PowerAccent (fave.co/3QQI0pb).
To use it, simply hold down the
relevant alphabet key and then tap
either the space bar or the left
arrow. For example, if you need to
rapidly write about a spicy pepper
but your keyboard isn’t set up for
Spanish characters, just hold down
the n key and tap the space bar to
put in an ñ for jalepeño. Characters
with multiple accent options can
be selected with the arrow keys.
Screen Ruler is pretty much
exactly what it says: a quick way to
measure the area between two
points on your screen, in pixels.
For example, just by pressing the
activation shortcut Win+Shift+M, I
can tell you the width of my
WordPress writing window is
exactly 1836×1392 pixels (3),
something I’d have had to dip into Photoshop
to figure out before now. Neat!
PowerToys is a free download from its
GitHub page, available for Windows 10 and
11 in standard and ARM flavors (note that you
need a 64-bit machine to run it). If you have a
multiple-monitor setup, I insist you give

you use Windows, you want
PowerToys. This collection of opensource
goodies, guided and published
by Microsoft itself, is one of the best free
software packages out there, and we can’t
recommend it enough. That only becomes
more true today, as the company publishes an
updated version with three brand-new tools
(fave.co/3LnX50m): the previously spotted
Text Extractor (an optical character
recognition tool, fave.co/3UegHYO), a ruler
for measuring pixels on your screen, and a
tool for quickly inserting little-used accents
into text.
Text Extractor is probably the most
universally applicable addition here. It’s an
open-source version of Joseph Finney’s paid
Text Grab app, now integrated into
PowerToys and free for Windows users. The
tool essentially acts just like a screenshot
grabber, allowing you to highlight an area of
an image (1) and automatically grab any text