Microsoft has released a new stable version of PowerToys. There is a ton of interesting improvements and fixes in this release. However, the Video Conference Mute Tool is still not included.
First of all, there is an upcoming system requirements change. PowerToys will start requiring Windows 10 v1903 or greater after 0.35.x release. Microsoft said that it will be possible to continue supporting older Windows 10 releases, but only after migration to WinUI3. Currently it is not possible for Microsoft to support Windows 10 versions below 1903, so the company will raise the requirements.
Second, there is no Video Conference Mute tool in this release. The company is about to test it more in the upcoming experimental version 0.36 of PowerToys. It allows muting your microphone and/or camera for all apps at once. For now, it remains exclusively available in experimental versions.
Here are the changes made to the PowerToys apps.
What's new in PowerToys 0.35
Color Picker
- UX adjustments to editor.
Esccan now be used to exit the editor.
FancyZones
- Added hotkeys and quick swap functionality for custom layouts! Users can now assign a hotkey in the editor and use it to quickly set a desktop's zones with
Ctrl + Win + Alt + NUMBERkey binding, or by pressing the hotkey while dragging a window. - UX updates.
- Fixed zone placement algorithm for when the Taskbar is vertical
- Bug fixes
PowerToys Run
- Users can specify where to show the launcher window.
- New plugin added to support opening previously used Visual Studio Code workspaces, remote machines (SSH or Codespaces), and containers! When enabled, use
{to query for available workspaces. Please note, this plugin is off by default. - Shell history now saves the raw command instead of the resolved command. A command like
%appdata%would now save in the Shell history as is instead ofC:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming. - Better logging to try to track down some bugs
- Bug fixes
Download PowerToys
You can download PoweToys from GitHub.
There, you'll find both stable and pre-release versions of the app suite.
PowerToys apps
As of now, Windows 10 PowerToys include the following apps.
- [work-in-progress] Screen Recorder - The new tool will allow the user to record an app of a screen portion, and save the recording to a file . It will include an option to create a GIF animation from what the user captured. Some other features include the ability to trim the capture, and set video/GIF quality.
- [work-in-progress] Video Conference Mute tool - an experimental tool that allows muting both audio and video on your computer with a single keystroke or click.
- 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 Add-ons - a set of addons for File Explorer. Currently includes two Preview Pane additions to show contents of *.MD and *.SVG files.
- 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.
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