Small things, each of which saves a real amount of time.
Hotkeys
Around twenty tools ship unbound on purpose. ePOE refuses to squat on keys you might use in game. Go to Overlays → Hotkeys, pick the four or five tools you actually reach for, and give them keys. Everything else stays out of your way.
`Ctrl+Alt+E` opens this app from anywhere, including from inside the game. It is the one hotkey worth remembering even if you rebind everything else.
Bind Panic Hide if you ever share your screen. One press hides every ePOE window, a second press brings them back.
Bind "Open last trade search" if you often want to finish a search in the browser with the trade site's own filters. It reopens what you just checked instead of making you rebuild it.
The chat commands have hotkeys too. Ctrl+Alt+1 invites the last person who whispered you, Ctrl+Alt+2 opens a trade with them. You can edit the templates and add your own under Overlays → Overlays → Trade & Whisper — {name} is substituted with the most recent whisper's character name.
On a controller, the same tools bind to chords instead of keys — see the controller support guide for the defaults and Exclusive Mode.
Streaming and screen sharing
Settings → Privacy → Streamer mode excludes every ePOE window from screen capture. On Windows this uses the OS's own capture-exclusion, so the windows stay visible on your monitor but never appear in OBS, ShadowPlay or Game Bar frames.
A useful side effect: it also fixes the black-box and flicker artefacts that layered overlays sometimes cause in Game Capture, even if you do not care about hiding ePOE.
Appearance worth changing
Density. Comfortable, compact, or minimal. If you run the overlay on a 1080p screen, compact fits substantially more on the card.
Per-widget opacity and scale. Under Overlays, each widget can override the global opacity and scale. The usual use is making the feature bar small and unobtrusive while keeping the price panel readable.
Screen dim. A tint behind the overlay while attached. Set it low — it makes the panel legible over bright zones without hiding the game.
Reduce motion if animations bother you, and display font if you would rather not have the ornate headings.
Profiles and config
Profiles (Settings → Profiles) save named snapshots of your price-check, trade and behaviour settings. A profile can be bound to a league and switches on automatically when you pick that league — handy for keeping trade-league and SSF setups apart, or a known-good setup before experimenting.
Reset to defaults works per-section, not only globally, so you can reset your hotkeys without losing everything else.
See the settings and notifications guide for a full tour of what lives on each Settings tab.
The overlay itself
Multi-monitor: Settings → General decides which screen the standalone windows open on. It applies to the *next* window you open, not ones already up.
Close-on-game-focus auto-hides the overlay card when the game regains focus. Some people find this essential and others find it maddening; it is off by default.
Restore clipboard puts back whatever you had copied after ePOE copies an item. Off by default because it adds a small delay, on if you routinely have something in your clipboard you care about.
Scroll triggers. By default Ctrl+Scroll sends a left click and Left Alt+Scroll flips stash tabs — up for the next tab, down for the previous one. Both are now configurable under Overlays → Hotkeys → Scroll triggers: pick each trigger's Modifier (Ctrl and Alt must match exactly; Shift is ignored unless you pick it) and what Scroll up and Scroll down do — Left click, Previous stash tab, Next stash tab or Nothing. They only act while Path of Exile 2 is the active window. Give the two triggers different modifiers; if they share one, only the click trigger fires.
Mouse buttons that only do the ePOE thing. A hotkey bound to Mouse 3, 4 or 5 normally reaches the game as well. On Windows, Block Bound Mouse Buttons In Game under Overlays → Hotkeys → Mouse buttons stops that. It is off by default and deliberately narrow:
- Only the buttons you actually bound are held back, and only while the Path of Exile 2 window is focused. Other apps, unbound buttons, and the left and right buttons are never touched.
- The ePOE hotkey still fires; only the game stops seeing the press.
- It fails open. It runs as a small separate helper; if the helper cannot start, is blocked by security software, or stops, your clicks simply reach the game again — you never end up with a dead mouse button.
- If the game runs as Administrator and ePOE does not, Windows hides the game's input from the helper and nothing is blocked. Run both at the same level.
- It applies to this PC only and is never synced.
Windows and popouts
Any page can be a window over the game. That is what the feature-bar buttons do. In this guide library, "Open in game" does the same for the guide you are reading — handy for keeping a crafting reference up while you work.
Tool windows are reused, not recreated. Closing one with the ✕ hides it; pressing its hotkey again brings the same window back where you left it. Several can be open at once.
The feature bar is draggable and remembers where you put it. Choose which buttons it shows under Overlays → Overlays → Feature Bar — craftsim, runes, services and favourites are off by default, so add them if you use them. The same section's Launcher setting switches between the bar, the Selection Wheel, or both — see the selection wheel and favourites guide.
Small things that add up
- Recent Price Checks (wheel, feature bar, or a key you bind) reopens recent price checks. Much cheaper than re-checking, and it does not touch the rate limit.
- The notepad persists. It is the right place for the whisper you are about to send or the price you agreed.
- The stopwatch is for timing one thing; the leveling tracker's session timer is for the whole session.
- Turn on Auto price check so one keystroke does the whole job.
- The notification bell in the title bar is the same inbox as epoe.io. Clicking an entry navigates to the right page.
- Settings → Data tells you how current the bundled game data is. Worth a glance after a patch.
- Help → Submit a Bug attaches your version, OS and league automatically, which makes reports actionable — no separate diagnostics step, your session is always stripped before anything is sent.
The notepad, stopwatch, recent checks and the rest of the always-available widgets are covered together in the in-game widgets guide.
Things ePOE will not do
Worth repeating because it is the question that comes up most:
It reads the clipboard and Client.txt, and reads pixels in six small bounded regions for the features that need it. It does not read game memory, inject anything, or play for you.
Keystrokes it sends are the ones you just pressed a button for: opening chat to send one whisper or chat command, or Ctrl+F/Ctrl+A/Ctrl+V to paste a regex. It never presses Enter in a search box — a search box that submits on its own is one step from automation — and it never acts without you asking.