Microsoft has released a new experimental version of PowerToys. Not much has changed in this release. It just includes everything from the stable version 0.35 + Conference Muting Tool.
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The company is testing the Video Conference Mute tool in this release more before including it in the stable app. It allows muting your microphone and/or camera for all apps at once. For now, it remains exclusively available in experimental versions.
Version 0.36 comes with the following known issues.
- with some webcams, there is an incompatibility with Teams and the overlay image is not rendered, instead a corrupted frame is shown.
- the application preview (Teams, Meet, etc.) may show the overlay image flipped horizontally but that is expected, the image will show correctly to the other people on the call.
- in order to enable/disable the VCM, PowerToys should run as administrator
- changes to some of the VCM settings require the application to restart to pick up the new values such as a new overlay image.
- in some cases, the overlay image can be shown flipped vertically (the workaround is to edit the image and flip it before selecting it).
if the PowerToys Video Conference Mute webcam doesn't show up in the video conference app, try restarting the app and if still doesn't show up try restarting Windows.
Keep in mind that this release will not be on WinGet. Microsoft is evaluating if this is something people would be interested in.
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.
It allows you to remap a single key, or a key sequence (shortcut).
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