PowerToys 0.102 Moves Color Picker and Text Extractor to WinUI 3: What's Changed

Microsoft's Niels Laute put the change in one line of the 0.102 announcement on the Windows Command Line blog: "Color Picker and Text Extractor also move to WinUI 3". Most of the coverage went to the new mouse utilities. The framework change is quieter, but it may matter longer.

What changed in PowerToys 0.102​

The main release, version 0.102.2933.0, was published on Microsoft's GitHub releases page on October 21, 2026. Microsoft's official notes say both move to WinUI 3, with a new overlay, editor, and magnifier for Color Picker. The same notes promise that your existing shortcuts and settings carry over.

The detailed changelog has a little more. Color Picker's entry describes a WinUI 3 picking overlay, editor, and magnifier while preserving existing color workflows. Text Extractor was modernized with WinUI 3 overlays while preserving text-capture modes, shortcuts, and settings.

The rest of 0.102 is a big release. It brings two new mouse utilities, Mouse Button Lock and CursorHide, an optional quick-access shelf for Command Palette, snip dictation in ZoomIt, and a set of new command-line tools for automating PowerToys. PCWorld also pointed out that FancyZones now supports switching between window layouts using the mouse wheel.

What it means for you:

• Color Picker looks visibly different: new overlay, editor and magnifier.
• Text Extractor's overlay was rebuilt from scratch, and its capture modes stay the same.
• Microsoft says hotkeys and settings carry over, so you shouldn't need to reconfigure anything.

You probably want 0.102.3001.0, not 0.102.2933.0​

On October 27, Microsoft followed up with hotfix 0.102.3001.0. According to the project's GitHub releases page, it fixes crashes in File Locksmith and Quick Accent. It is now marked as the latest stable build. TechSpot's download listing also shows "softwareVersion":"0.102.3001.0". The hotfix doesn't change Color Picker or Text Extractor. Still, if you're updating today, this is the build you'll get, and it's the one you should have.

Both builds come in per-user and machine-wide installers for x64 and ARM64. GitHub publishes a SHA-256 hash for each file. Admins deploying PowerToys across a fleet should check the downloaded file against the hash on the official release page before packaging it.

How Microsoft rebuilt the two tools​

Color Picker​

The project's main migration tracker on GitHub ("Migrate existing WPF/WinForm utility to WinUI3") calls Color Picker's move a full module migration. It covered the picking overlay, color editor, zoom magnifier, settings and the Win32 input hooks. The developers also replaced the old MEF plug-in system with Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection. You won't notice that, but it's the kind of cleanup that makes later fixes cheaper.

Text Extractor​

Text Extractor (called PowerOCR in the codebase) needed more work. The migration issue lists three problems specific to this tool:

1. The full-screen snipping overlay. It has to be transparent, borderless, always on top, and appear on every display at once.
2. Drawing the selection region. The old version used a WPF clipping technique (CombinedGeometry) that WinUI 3 doesn't support.
3. Positioning across multiple monitors and DPI settings. This had to be rewritten for WinUI's display and window APIs.

Here is how they were solved:

• The overlay is now one borderless, always-on-top window per display, created only after every display has been captured.
• The old clipping trick was replaced with four mask rectangles around a selection border.
• Window placement was rewritten so it handles mixed scaling and monitors positioned at negative virtual-desktop coordinates, which is common when a second screen sits to the left of or above the main one.
• Pointer coordinates are converted to physical pixels using each window's own scale factor.

Under the hood, the OCR, bitmap preparation, text formatting, table analysis and selection geometry now live in a separate library, PowerOCR.Core. The new overlay ships as a self-contained app, PowerToys.PowerOCR.exe, in the WinUI3Apps\ folder. The module interface DLL stays in the install root. The issue also lists things that had to stay the same: process name, mutex, Group Policy behavior, named events, the keyboard hook, the settings JSON and telemetry events. That's why your configuration should survive the update.

Why Microsoft is doing this​

The tracker gives a plain reason. PowerToys utilities came from different sources over many years, so the codebase now mixes WPF, WinUI 3, WinForms and C++ UI code. The tracker says that confuses new contributors and makes the project harder to maintain. WinUI 3 matches the Windows 11 look, lets the team merge duplicate code, and could make the install smaller.

Windows Latest says PowerToys 0.102 has moved Color Picker and Text Extractor to WinUI 3, joining Image Resizer, Quick Accent, Mouse Jump, and the Keyboard Manager editor, which all switched over this year.

How much disk space it could save​

The tracker includes size estimates based on an installed PowerToys 0.100.2 x64 build: 960 MB on disk, with a 271.7 MB installer.

These are goals, not savings you get from 0.102. PowerToys currently bundles the WPF/WinForms desktop runtime twice, once in the install root and once in WinUI3Apps\. The second copy is there because two shared libraries, Common.UI and Settings.UI.Library, still depend on WPF. Until those are made framework-neutral, migrating individual tools doesn't shrink the install much. The base .NET runtime and the Windows App SDK stay either way.

Even the best case is about 14% of the install. If you were hoping PowerToys would shed hundreds of megabytes, this won't do it. The main gains are consistency and a codebase that's easier to work on.

What's staying on WPF​

Some parts aren't moving:

• PowerToys Run won't migrate. Its plugin interface uses WPF types and more than 22 plugins depend on it. The tracker says changing it would break the plugin ecosystem for little UI gain. Microsoft's newer launcher work is in Command Palette.
• STL Thumbnail Provider stays too. It has no UI, and the 3D library it relies on has no WinUI 3 equivalent.
• Workspaces is listed as in progress.
• The FancyZones Editor migration is waiting on a UX redesign led by Niels Laute. An earlier draft pull request was closed without merging.

So for a while you'll have a mix: the new Color Picker next to a FancyZones editor that still looks like the old one.

Has multi-monitor support been tested?​

Some early coverage said Text Extractor's multi-monitor and mixed-DPI checks were still open. The project's own records give a more mixed answer:

• The Text Extractor issue's checklist includes manual testing across multiple monitors, mixed per-monitor DPI, and light, dark and high-contrast themes.
• It reports 23 of 23 PowerOCR.Core unit tests passing and successful x64 and ARM64 release builds.
• The automated UI tests compile, but they were blocked because the test runner (WinAppDriver) wasn't available in the build environment.
• The issue was closed as completed on September 10, 2026, in the PowerToys 0.102 milestone. The parent tracker now says the multi-monitor and mixed-DPI blockers are "addressed."

The code clearly handles these setups. What the records don't show is the full UI test run that would usually back that up. There's no known bug here, but a laptop next to a 4K monitor at a different scaling level is the setup most likely to show a problem.

How to update and check that everything works​

1. Update PowerToys. Use the built-in update check in PowerToys Settings (General page). How-To Geek says PowerToys 0.102 is now available for download by checking for updates in the app or heading to the official release pages on GitHub. A recent 0.103 preview fixed a Settings bug where Check for updates could show an old saved result. If 0.102 doesn't show up, download the installer from the GitHub release page instead.
2. Confirm the version. You should be on 0.102.3001.0.
3. Test Color Picker with your usual shortcut. Check that the overlay, magnifier and editor open, and that your saved color formats and history are still there.
4. Test Text Extractor on every monitor, especially if your screens use different scaling. Draw a selection on each screen and check that the overlay covers the right area and the captured text matches what you selected.
5. Try your usual capture modes. The keyboard shortcuts inside the overlay (Esc, S, T and the number keys) were meant to keep working the same way.
6. Report problems on GitHub. If an overlay appears on the wrong screen or a selection is offset, file an issue with your monitor layout and scaling percentages.

Bottom line​

You won't notice much new day to day, apart from Color Picker's redesign. The bigger effect is on the project: fewer UI frameworks to maintain, and a path toward dropping the duplicate WPF runtime. Whether the install actually shrinks depends on the shared libraries being migrated, so expect that later rather than now.