Always on Top may not be the flashiest tool in PowerToys, but it is one that I use every day to boost my productivity. It is very useful for keeping stuff like sticky notes, a calculator, a messenger, or something else on the side of my ultrawide monitor without distracting me too much and without me having to Alt + Tab between apps just to see what"s next in my to-do list. While some apps in Windows 11 support Compact Overlay, there is no system-wide tool that lets you pin a window above all. PowerToys fixes that with Always on Top, and a future update could bring a very useful upgrade to it.
A pull request on GitHub suggests adding transparency to Always on Top so that you can make pinned windows transparent and see through them. If implemented (there are several requests from users to add transparency support to Alwyas on Top), the feature would also let you adjust the opacity with keyboard shortcuts between 20% and 100%. There are small apps for making windows transparent, so you can try one and combine it with Always on Top to see how the proposed feature will work.
For now, transparency support in Always on Top has not been approved, so there is no guarantee that Microsoft will include it in the next PowerToys update. In its current form, Always on Top lets you adjust the pinned window border, color, and opacity, toggle sound effects on or off, customize the activation shortcut, and specify apps that should never be pinned. Transparency could be a very handy addition to this utility, and you can learn about the proposed upgrade on GitHub here.
Meanwhile, check out some of the other things that may soon make it to PowerToys and release notes for the latest major update (and a minor one that followed), which introduced a brand-new mouse module and a bunch of improvements for Command Palette.