Microsoft Releases PowerToys 0.14 With PowerRename and FancyZones Improvements

PowerToys Icon

Microsoft releases a new version of their newest Windows 10 PowerToys app suite. While this release doesn't include new features, it comes with a number of improvements made to existing features.

As of now, Windows 10 PowerToys include the following apps.

  • 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.

Today's release increases the app version to 0.14 and comes with the following change log.

What's new in Windows PowerToys 0.14

FancyZones

Changes:

  • Removed legacy editor (along with the settings option to choose between the legacy editor and the new editor).
  • Added a settings to disable FancyZones for user defined list of applications.
  • The editor now opens highlighting the current active layout.
  • Show the correct keyboard key for the editor shortcut (with some limitations due to the WebView control).

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed the FancyZones bug that was stealing the number keys (mostly happening when dragging Chrome tabs).
  • Fixed a DPI scaling bug in the FancyZones editor that was causing the zones to be placed in the wrong position on the screen.
  • Fixed bug preventing several apps from working with FancyZones (there are still some cases, like remote apps, that may not work).

PowerRename

Changes:

  • The dialog can be resized (still need to finished the work to handle DPI changes when moving the dialog between screen with different scaling %).
  • Added settings to restore search and replace flags value from previous run.
  • Added settings to enable autocomplete and auto-suggest.

Bug fixes:

  • Improved RegEx replace result.
  • Fix bug preventing sub-folder items to be renamed if parent folder is also renamed.

Other bug fixes

  • fixed a bug in the runner that was causing the tray icon to not appear.
  • minor UI tweaks to the Settings appearance (icons position and margins, module's description text and documentation links position and margins).
  • fixed a crash in the ShortcutGuide.

NOTE: when upgrading from a previous version, the installer will close all the Windows Explorer windows in order to update the PowerRename shell extension.

You can get it here:

Download Windows PowerToys

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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