Windows 10: The Best Hidden Features

Explorer now has a “Home” tabAfter using Windows 10 for almost a week, I’ve discovered some neat little changes and features that Microsoft hasn’t yet discussed — smart tweaks that, if you’re a mouse-and-keyboard user looking for a reason to upgrade from Windows 7, you will be very pleased with. Let’s dive straight in with my favorite secret/hidden features of Windows 10.

In the last few versions of Windows, opening My Computer or a new Explorer window would show you your computer’s various storage locations and shortcuts to default folders like Documents and My Pictures. In Windows 10, you now end up in a new view called Home, which shows Favorites, Frequent Folders, and Recent Files. Take a look at the screenshot below and you’ll see what I mean.

Windows 10, Explorer’s new Home tab

Favorites seems to be where Documents or My Pictures should appear. I don’t know the math behind the Frequent Folders, but it looks like it just tracks which folders I’ve opened the most times. Recent Files is like the Recent Places feature that premiered in Windows Vista, but just for files.

I assume that folders can be added to the Favorites section, but I haven’t yet worked out how to do it. (To be honest, the more advanced features of Explorer, like Libraries, are still pretty hard to penetrate.)

“This PC” is still available from the left-hand menu if you want to manage your various storage locations/default folders. I like the new Home tab a lot.

You can finally put the Recycle Bin on the taskbar

Rather than having to poke around Explorer or minimize everything and find the Recycle Bin icon on the Desktop, in Windows 10 you can now add the Recycle Bin to both the taskbar and the Start menu. Yes, that is the sound of many brains exploding as they catastrophically realize the enormity of this change.

Windows 10, resized Start menu

The Windows 10 Start menu is resizable

This one is a bit odd: You can make the Windows 10 Start menu as tall or as wide as you like. If you want to have a Start menu that takes up the entire left side of your screen, or a narrow strip across the taskbar, then that’s now possible. The taskbar itself is also resizable, which means you can do weird stuff like this:

Windows 10, resized Start menu and taskbar. Could you do this in Windows 7 or 8…?

I’m not sure if this is second bit is intentional or not. A resizable Start menu is quite cool, though!

Cortana is almost definitely coming to Windows 10

After a little bit of poking around (searching for “Cortana” in Explorer) I found a lot of references to Cortana in Windows 10 Technical Preview; there’s even aWindows.Cortana.dll, just sitting there in the System32 directory.

You also get a bunch of Cortana-related hits if you search for “Cortana” within the Registry Editor.

None of this is to say that Cortana is definitely coming to Windows 10 — there are lots of other reasons for those files/registry entries being there, such as the ghost of an early internal test — but I’d say it’s pretty likely. We should hopefully see Cortana in the next beta of Windows 10.

Windows 10 notifications/toasts, in the top right corner

Windows 10 notifications/toasts, in the top right corner

Notifications and toasts in Windows 10

While Windows 10′s rumored Notification Tray isn’t yet in the Technical Preview, there are some new pretty toasts/notifications that pop up in the top right corner of the screen. These notifications appear to replace the speech bubbles that used to pop out of the system tray (the bottom right corner of the taskbar, unless you’re one of those heathens who has moved the taskbar to a non-standard location). You can see two example notifications in the images above, but there are similar toasts for successful uploads to Dropbox and similar activities.

As far as I can tell, these notifications/toasts are configured through the same interface that Metro notifications used in Windows 8/8.1 — i.e. in PC Settings (see below). It seems desktop apps like VLC and the Adobe Creative Cloud manager/updater were automatically added to the list of apps that are allowed to pop up notifications.

It’s entirely possible that this is all the Desktop interface is going to get, in terms of notifications. The new Notification Tray might only be coming to the Metro interface.

Somewhat unbelievably, despite the Windows 10 unveil event being only 40 minutes long, Microsoft actually dedicated a couple of minutes to Windows 10′s Command Prompt (cmd). At the time, Joe Belfiore told us that Command Prompt is finally gaining the ability to paste with Ctrl-V (previously, you had to right click > paste). It turns out, there’s a lot more, too.The Command Prompt is getting so much more than just Ctrl-V

If you right click Command Prompt’s title bar and head to Properties then Experimental, you get a bunch of new options (see above). In fact, you have to turn on the experimental options before you can use Ctrl-V to paste. With experimental options turned on, you can also use Shift-arrow keys to mark text (for copying and pasting with Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V). The other options are mostly self-explanatory, though I am still trying to discover what the “extended edit keys” are (let me know in the comments if you’ve found some!)

The new Task View in Windows 10, showing apps and virtual desktops

Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts for virtual desktops, improved snapping, task view

One of Windows 10′s bigger new features is virtual desktops — additional instances of the Desktop that you can use to better organize your workspace. There’s also improved snapping, and a new view called Task View that’s kind of like Alt-Tab, but it incorporates your virtual desktops as well. All of these new features have associated keyboard shortcuts to make using them a cinch.

• Task View is opened up with Windows Key-Tab. It looks very like the new Alt-Tab interface, but it stays open after you let go of the keys. You can also add, remove, and manage virtual desktops from this interface.
• Windows Key-Ctrl-Arrow (left or right) switches you to the next virtual desktop on the left or right.
• Windows Key-Ctrl-D creates a new virtual desktop. Windows Key-Ctrl-F4 closes the current virtual desktop.
• Windows Key-Up arrow and Windows Key-Down arrow can now be used to snap the current app to the top or bottom of the screen (this is in addition to Win-Left and Win-Right for snapping to the left and right of the screen). Tapping these shortcuts multiple times creates different effects: Tapping Win-Up once maximizes an app; twice snaps it to the top. Win-Down once snaps to the bottom; twice minimizes it. You can also use Win-Left/Right to move apps incrementally across a multi-monitor setup.

The Windows 10 Metro app menu – not yet accessible via the keyboard

At the Windows 10 unveil event, Belfiore said that Metro apps (which now run in a window on the Desktop) would also be gaining better controls for mouse and keyboard — but so far, nothing much seems to have changed.

Metro apps now have a special menu in the top left corner to access functions that used to be available through the Charms bar — Search, Share, etc. — but so far, there doesn’t seem to be a way of accessing this menu via the keyboard.

There are still lots of features hidden in PC Settings

Rather unfortunately, and despite the fact that the Metro interface is significantly downplayed in the mouse-and-keyboard version of Windows 10, you sadly still have to go into PC Settings to tweak a lot of settings.

Some settings, like Power and Sleep, can be modified from both PC Settings and Control Panel. Ditto Mouse and Touchpad; change the number of lines to scroll with each move of the wheel, and it updates in both control panels.

For the most part, PC Settings is just a simplified/cut-down version of Control Panel (which is actually kind of nice) — but in some cases, it’s still the only way to change some settings, such as the new notifications/toasts, the lock screen, and tweaking finer details like “downloading over metered connections.” The worst bit, though, is that the old Control Panel doesn’t link into the new PC Settings in any way — search for “lock” in Control Panel, and all you get a link to the ancient screen saver settings.

Windows 10 Control Panel: Still missing lots of options from PC Settings

Hopefully, by the time future Windows 10 beta builds arrive, Microsoft will ensure that Control Panel has every option that’s available in PC Settings (i.e. PC Settings is just a subset of most-used/most-useful settings) — or, at the very least, update the Control Panel search function so that it can link directly to PC Settings.

That’s all the Windows 10 hidden features and tricks that I have for now. If you installed the Technical Preview yourself and found some other neat tips and tricks, let me know in the comments.