Windows 10 May 2019 Update Feature Focus: Light Themes And Sandboxes

Game Bar Updates

If you use the Game Bar in Windows 10 for capturing your gaming sessions, the Game Bar now features a gallery to view your clips and screenshots without having to leave the game. It’s a small but welcome touch.

Print Menu Updates

Printers are the bane of modern computing, but Windows 10 has improved the default printing experience with a better layout and better descriptions of the various options. The print experience also now has light-theme support to go along with the overall theming updates.

Windows Security App

The Windows Security app gets a bit of attention as well, offering a new Protection History page where you can check up on what actions it has taken. The history even shows events detected by the offline scanning tool, which is very convenient. There’s also a new Tamper Protection setting which prevents applications changing Windows Defender Antivirus settings.

Clipboard History

The new cloud clipboard introduced in Windows 10 October 2018 update is a fantastic feature, and combined with the snip and sketch options it is a winning combination that makes it difficult to use a previous version of Windows 10, if you’ve come to appreciate the new tools. The clipboard history can be accessed with Windows + V, and for 1903 it’s been redesigned to a more compact view so it doesn’t hog as much screen real estate.

As before, it works well, but I would still like the ability to keep the clipboard history open as a separate app, and although it’s more compact now, it limits what you can see if you’ve screen captured images, so if it was a standalone app, it could be resized as well. One of these days I’ll file that feedback with Microsoft.

Task Manager

A small but welcome change is you can now set the Task Manager to default to any of the available tabs. If you use the task manager often, as I do, this is a welcome change.

Sorted Downloads Folder

If you are like me, the Downloads folder is a dumping ground of many things, which can make it difficult to find what you are looking for after saving files there. With 1903, the Download folder will now sort based on the date the file was downloaded. This, of course, can be changed, but will be the default going forward, and this is one of those little changes that are incredibly helpful. When you have hundreds of files in Downloads, and save a file with some random name, it can be difficult to easily find it, but sorted by date with nice clear delineation makes the task infinitely easier.

Console Updates

The console gets some more improvements as well, including the ability to disable scroll forward, and the ability to choose the default cursor, and cursor color. The console has also added improved parsing and handling of ANSI/VT sequences, and how it renders colors. Microsoft has really improved the console dramatically in the last several versions, and the company makes no bones about leveraging ideas that work well in Linux in their own console, as well as making the console more Linux friendly.

Notepad

Notepad got updated. Yes. Your eyes are not deceiving you. Notepad didn’t play well with Linux files, and with Microsoft putting so much support into their Windows Subsystem for Linux, that could not stand. Notepad will now save files by default in UTF-8 without a Byte Order Mark, and Notepad will also display the encoding of a document in its status bar so you’ll know instantly what kind of file you are working in. But wait! There’s more! Notepad will also place an * in the title screen if it is working in a file that hasn’t yet been saved, so you will know at a glance whether the file has been written back to the disk or not.