Michael Jolley bcb2ed6dc7 CmdPal: Fix Command Palette Dock breaking on monitor topology changes (#49814)
Docking or undocking a laptop, or flipping display modes with Win+P, can
leave the Dock empty, missing, or misconfigured. Fixes #48516.

The root of it: the Dock's per-monitor config leans on a stable hardware
ID for each monitor. Right after a `WM_DISPLAYCHANGE`, before Windows
has settled the new topology, that lookup can come back empty or fall
back to a volatile GDI name. The reconciler then reads that as "hey, a
new monitor showed up" and creates a fresh, disabled, empty config for a
monitor that never actually left. On top of that, a burst of
`WM_DISPLAYCHANGE` messages during a mode switch each triggered an
immediate write to settings, so one bad intermediate snapshot could get
baked in permanently. And since only the Dock window itself was
listening for `WM_DISPLAYCHANGE`, the Settings page's monitor list could
go stale whenever no Dock window happened to be alive.

## The plan

- Retry the stable-ID lookup a few times before giving up and falling
back to the volatile name.
- Debounce monitor-change handling so a flurry of `WM_DISPLAYCHANGE`
events settles down before we reconcile and persist, instead of writing
every half-finished intermediate state.
- Have the main window forward `WM_DISPLAYCHANGE` too, so the monitor
cache stays fresh even when the Dock is off or has no windows up.
- Teach the reconciler to reassociate a secondary monitor's config with
its new ID when there's exactly one unmatched monitor and one unmatched
config, the Win+P round trip case, instead of treating it as new
hardware.
- Added tests covering the transient ID fallback, the ambiguous
multi-monitor case, and the Win+P reassociation.

Scaling behavior when the Dock lands on a monitor with a different DPI
is a separate issue (#48466) and isn't touched here.

---------

Copilot-Session: d2bc281b-062c-4e6e-9356-bdb7a2ef9e1e
2026-08-14 16:52:18 -05:00

Microsoft PowerToys

Microsoft PowerToys is a collection of utilities that help you customize Windows and streamline everyday tasks.

Installation · Documentation · Blog · Release notes

🔨 Utilities

PowerToys includes over 30 utilities to help you customize and optimize your Windows experience:

Advanced Paste icon Advanced Paste Always on Top icon Always on Top Awake icon Awake
Color Picker icon Color Picker Command Not Found icon Command Not Found Command Palette icon Command Palette
Crop and Lock icon Crop And Lock Environment Variables icon Environment Variables FancyZones icon FancyZones
File Explorer Add-ons icon File Explorer Add-ons File Locksmith icon File Locksmith Grab And Move icon Grab And Move
Hosts File Editor icon Hosts File Editor Image Resizer icon Image Resizer Keyboard Manager icon Keyboard Manager
Light Switch icon Light Switch Mouse Utilities icon Mouse Utilities Mouse Without Borders icon Mouse Without Borders
New+ icon New+ Peek icon Peek PowerDisplay icon PowerDisplay
PowerRename icon PowerRename PowerToys Run icon PowerToys Run Quick Accent icon Quick Accent
Registry Preview icon Registry Preview Screen Ruler icon Screen Ruler Shortcut Guide icon Shortcut Guide
Text Extractor icon Text Extractor Workspaces icon Workspaces ZoomIt icon ZoomIt

📦 Installation

For detailed installation instructions and system requirements, visit the installation docs.

But to get started quickly, choose one of the installation methods below:

Download the .exe file from GitHub

Go to the PowerToys GitHub releases, scroll down and select Assets to reveal the installation files, and choose the one that matches your architecture and install scope. For most devices, that would be x64 per-user.

Microsoft Store
You can easily install PowerToys from the Microsoft Store:

WinGet
Download PowerToys from [WinGet](https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli#installing-the-client). Updating PowerToys via winget will respect the current PowerToys installation scope. To install PowerToys, run the following command from the command line / PowerShell:
  • User scope installer (default)
winget install Microsoft.PowerToys -s winget
  • Machine-wide scope installer
winget install --scope machine Microsoft.PowerToys -s winget
Other methods
There are [community driven install methods](https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/powertoys/install#community-driven-install-tools) such as Chocolatey and Scoop. If these are your preferred install solutions, you can find the install instructions there.

What's new?

What's new image

To see what's new, check out the release notes.

🛣️ Roadmap

We are planning some nice new features and improvements for the next releases a brand-new Shortcut Guide experience, ensuring it's easier to find and install Command Palette extensions and so much more! Stay tuned for v0.100!

❤️ PowerToys Community

The PowerToys team is extremely grateful to have the support of an amazing active community. The work you do is incredibly important. PowerToys wouldn't be nearly what it is today without your help filing bugs, updating documentation, guiding the design, or writing features. We want to say thank you and take time to recognize your work. Your contributions and feedback improve PowerToys month after month!

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions of all types. Besides coding features / bug fixes, other ways to assist include spec writing, design, documentation, and finding bugs. We are excited to work with the power user community to build a set of tools for helping you get the most out of Windows. We ask that before you start work on a feature that you would like to contribute, please read our Contributor's Guide. We would be happy to work with you to figure out the best approach, provide guidance and mentorship throughout feature development, and help avoid any wasted or duplicate effort. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you grant us the rights to use your contribution and that you have permission to do so. For guidance on developing for PowerToys, please read the developer docs for a detailed breakdown. This includes how to setup your computer to compile.

Code of conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

Privacy statement

The application logs basic diagnostic data (telemetry). For more privacy information and what we collect, see our PowerToys Data and Privacy documentation.

Description
Microsoft PowerToys is a collection of utilities that help you customize Windows and streamline everyday tasks
Readme MIT 743 MiB
Languages
C 44.9%
C# 26.4%
JavaScript 14%
C++ 13.8%
PowerShell 0.6%
Other 0.2%