As you may remember, Microsoft was about to include a new Color Picker tool to Windows PowerToys. This has happened today, with release of PowerToys 0.20.
PowerToys is a set of tiny handy utilities which were first introduced in Windows 95. Probably, most users will recollect TweakUI and QuickRes, which were really useful. The last version of the classic PowerToys suite was released for Windows XP. In 2019, Microsoft announced that they are reviving PowerToys for Windows and making them open source. Windows 10 PowerToys obviously are completely new and different, tailored for the new operating system.
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What's new in PowerToys 0.20
Windows system-wide color picker
The suite now includes a new tool, a simple and quick system-wide color picker. It allows the user to pick colors from any currently running application.
To open Color Picker - (default shortcut) - Left Ctrl + Break
To pick a color - Left mouse click - copies selected HEX color into the clipboard
To zoom in - Mouse wheel
Note: As of version 0.20 of PowerToys, Color Picker at times won't work when PT is running elevated. It is a known issue.
Others changes
- Martin Chrzan's Color Picker was added in! With a quick Win+Shift+C, get the color from your screen.
- File Explorer - Can now render SVG icons thanks to Chris Davis
- FancyZones - you can now snap to any number of zones in FancyZones holding Shift+Ctrl while dragging a window
- PT Run - keyboard interaction improvements
- PT Run - freshly installed apps are now being detected
- PT Run - Lots of perf and bug fixes
- Keyboard manager - app level shortcuts
- Example: For Outlook, Remap Ctrl+F to F4 and now Ctrl+F will put up the find window :)
- Keyboard manager - Now can remap key to shortcut and shortcut to key.
- Settings - Now has improved OOBE based on the work the Microsoft Garage Interns did during their hackathon
- PowerRename improvements
Download PowerToys
You can download the app from its Releases page on GitHub:
Available Tools
As of now, Windows 10 PowerToys include the following apps.
- ColorPicker - a simple and quick system-wide color picker that allows you to get the color value at any point of what you see on the screen.
- PowerRename - a tool that is intended to help you rename a large number of files using various naming conditions like search and replace a portion of the file name, define regular expressions, change letter case, and more. PowerRename is implemented as a shell extension for File Explorer (read plugin). It opens a dialog box with a bunch of options.
- FancyZones - FancyZones is a window manager that is designed to make it easy to arrange and snap windows into efficient layouts for your workflow, and also to restore these layouts quickly. FancyZones allows the user to define a set of window locations for a desktop that are drag targets for windows. When the user drags a window into a zone, the window is resized and repositioned to fill that zone.
- Windows key shortcut guide - The Windows key shortcut guide is a full screen overlay utility that provides a dynamic set of Windows key shortcuts that are applicable for the given desktop and currently active window. When the Windows key is held down for one second, (this time can be tuned in settings), an overlay appears on the desktop showing all available Windows key shortcuts and what action those shortcuts will take given the current state of the desktop and active window. If the Windows key continues to be held down after a shortcut is issued, the overlay will remain up and show the new state of the active window.
- Image Resizer, a Windows Shell Extension for quickly resizing images.
- File Explorer - a set of addons for File Explorer. Currently includes two Preview Pane additions to show contents of *.MD and *.SVG files.
- Window Walker is an app that lets you search and switch between windows that you have open, all from the comfort of your keyboard.
- PowerToys Run, provides a new Run command with extra options like quick search for apps, files, and docs. It supports extensions to get features like a calculator, dictionaries, nd online search engines.
- Keyboard Manager is a tool that allows remapping any key to a different function. It can be configured in the main PowerToys dialog.
It allows you to remap a single key, or a key sequence (shortcut).
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