Microsoft’s PowerToys suite, aimed at boosting productivity for Windows users, has released its version 0.75. This update brings forth a multitude of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Let’s delve into the key updates in this release.
Highlights
- New Utility: Environment Variables Editor
- This utility allows users to edit environment variables and offers the ability to configure profiles that can be enabled or disabled.
- The design and UI work was made possible thanks to the contributions of @niels9001.
- Settings Dashboard
- The Settings section now features a new Dashboard home page, providing quick access to enable modules, view short descriptions, and learn about activation methods.
- Once again, the design and UI work credit goes to @niels9001.
- Peek Enhancements
- Peek now has a previewer that hosts File Explorer previewers, supporting every file type that a machine can preview. This means that if a machine has Microsoft Office handlers installed, Peek can preview Office files.
- These improvements are credited to @dillydylann.
General Updates
- A slew of typo fixes have been made across the projects and documentation, thanks to @brianteeman.
- Logic across utilities has been refactored and improved for bringing a window to the foreground post-activation.
Utility-Specific Updates
- Color Picker: The new update allows users to cancel the Color Picker session using the right mouse button.
- FancyZones: Several issues were addressed in this update, including the automatic snapping of context menu pop-ups from some apps to a zone and fixing windows that were snapped during a move to another virtual desktop.
- File Explorer add-ons: Crashes on invalid files in the STL Thumbnail generator have been fixed.
- GPO: A global GPO rule has been introduced that applies to all utilities unless overridden. Additionally, GPO rules have been added to control which PowerToys Run plugins should be enabled or disabled.
- Image Resizer: An issue with the wrong .bmp file association in the registry has been fixed.
- Keyboard Manager: The utility will now be disabled by default on new installations.
- Mouse Highlighter: The lower limit of fade delay and duration has been removed.
- Peek: Several enhancements and bug fixes have been introduced for Peek, including more accurate reported file sizes.
- PowerRename: Data from the last run will now be saved in a separate file to avoid conflicts with changing settings.
- PowerToys Run: Various enhancements, fixes, and plugin support have been added.
- Quick Accent: Several character sets have been expanded or corrected.
- Registry Preview: Parsing errors and other issues have been resolved.
- Runner: The update notification toast will now display a Unicode arrow.
- Settings: Apart from the new Dashboard, the flyout will now list all apps, regardless of whether their enabled state is controlled by policy.
- Video Conference Mute: Users can now choose for the toolbar to hide after a certain period and select to mute or unmute upon startup.
Documentation
- The Group Policy documentation has been updated on learn.microsoft.com. The documentation from the repository has been removed and now directly links to the published documentation on the Microsoft Learn site.
The community and developers behind PowerToys have done an exemplary job with this update, streamlining features, squashing bugs, and making the user experience more intuitive and powerful. With each update, Windows PowerToys continues to empower users with tools that enhance productivity and system functionality.