PowerToys Stable Version 0.29.0 is Now Available

Microsoft has released a maintenance release of PowerToys. Version 0.29 includes a few new features, however, all the major changed planned for the software are postponed till the next version which will be released after holidays.

What's new in Windows PowerToys 0.29

• Bug report tool and improved logging.
• Various localization improvements.
• CodeQL added. Triggered via a cron timer twice a day.
• "How to use" docs moved to https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/powertoys/
  • This will allow the community to do direct PRs against those documents
• ARM64 Progress: .NET Core upgrade for code bases the PowerToys team controls is complete. We still have two external dependencies that are .NET Framework that need to be updated.
• Color Picker:
  • General bug fixes
  • Added ability to provide the name of the color at parity with Office and WinUI Color Picker.
• FancyZones: 
  • Allows to use Windows Snap on desktops that don't have a layout applied and for apps that are in the excluded list.
  • Bug fixes
• PowerToys Run: 
  • Improved performance
  • PT Run now supports accented characters.
• Installer: 
  • Option to extract the MSI from the .exe for enterprise scenarios and more options to do unattended installations.
  • Removed toast notifications during installation.

You can download PoweToys from GitHub.

PowerToys apps

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

• [a work-in-progress] Screen Recoder - 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.
• 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 - 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).