The Windows 10 April 2018 Update may just be starting to roll out, but Microsoft is working on the next version of Windows and members of the Windows Insider program can take the latest preview build for a spin starting today.

Windows 10 Preview Build 17666 includes improvements to the upcoming “Sets” feature and a whole bunch of other changes. One of the ones I’m most looking forward to trying is Clipboard history.

It may not sound exciting, but when the new Clipboard experience is enabled, hitting Ctrl+V will paste the last thing you copied, as always. But holding the Win+V keys will show a new window that includes your clipboard history, allowing you to choose what you want to paste. There’s also support for pinning items you use regularly.

Build 17666 also allows you to choose a dark theme for File Explorer to see a black background with light accent colors.

Microsoft has extended Start Menu search previews so you can see previews of apps, documents, and other content as you type your query. And you can now create names for Start Menu folder tiles.

As promised, there’s also an update to the Notepad application with support for Unix and Linux-style line endings, which means text files created on Linux won’t look ridiculous if you open them with Windows Notepad anymore.

Speaking of Notepad, you can also right-click text in a document and choose the “search with Bing” option to search the web for that text.

 

 

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7 replies on “Windows 10 Build 17666 brings Clipboard History, Explorer dark theme, search previews”

  1. Will the new roll-out break my wifi, like the Fall Creators Update?

  2. Not a fan of clipboard history for password security and such. Good that it can be turned off at least; hope it’s not on by default.
    Support for showing non-CR-LF txt files should also be good for text files created on Mac and iOS.

  3. Can you turn off clipboard history? There needs to be an API to keep something out of it at minimum, but even that would require password managers to update unless you want passwords where any app or person walking by your screen could get at them.

    1. Exactly what I was thinking. At work we regularly use dozens of passwords, many of which have to rotate regularly, making a password manager a must. After logging in, I can usually just copy something else and consign the password to oblivion, but this could leave a trail.

      We should be very wary of these sorts of improvements before headlines of criminals stealing passwords through clipboards cloud-shared through sets or something.

      1. Yeah this is a potential security risk. My current password manager auto-clears the clipboard after a set amount of time. That works fine as long as only a single entry can be held in the clipboard at a time. But with this change, I suppose any password manager would need to be able to clear the entire clipboard history for this to be secure.

  4. If you are a gamer living in Mom’s basement and can’t tolerate light anymore then why wouldn’t you just change to one of the accessibility themes like High Contrast? BTW be sure to take those vitamin D supplements.

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