PowerToys v0.56 Drops with FancyZones Updates, Upgrade to .NET 6 and Several Other Improvements

Microsoft’s dev team has just released a new update to PowerToys. The PowerToys 0.56 release cycle focuses “heavily” on stability and improvements, the company says. Some of its highlights include:

• Upgrade notes! A big feedback item for new versions was upgrade notes.
• FancyZones zone limit has been increased to 128 zones. Before the limit was 40.
• Timezone conversion plugin for PowerToys Run!
• Child and Popup window support for FancyZones.
• Find my mouse will now activate via shaking the mouse with a settings change!

Release notes for PowerToys 0.56.1

Always on Top

• Fixed excess GPU / CPU usage when enabled
• If border has focus, not closable via F4
• Changing border sizes should resize correctly for existing windows
• Border goes away with Outlook modal windows

ColorPicker

• No longer crashes during theme change

FancyZones

• Increased zone limit from 40 to 128.
• Child and Popup window support for FancyZones. To enable, go to Settings→FancyZones→Windows. These were bugs we fixed that without realizing it was a useful feature to most.

File explorer

• Fixes for Dev file preview:
  • Fix fix for object reference not set.
  • Fix for encoding UTF-8.
  • Fix for file is in use.
  • Fix for saying the file is too big.

Image Resizer

• Fix for invalid operation error. @CleanCodeDeveloper!

Mouse utility

• Find my mouse will now activate via shaking the mouse with a settings change!
• Find my mouse now can excludes apps.
• Fix for crosshair thickness looking odd due to anti-aliasing
• Fix for a hard crash on crosshair (This was a hotfix for 0.55)

PowerRename

• Will not spells check file names anymore.
• Autocomplete result box to not obscure apply button.
• Regex fix

PowerToys Run

• Timezone conversion plugin for PowerToys Run!
• Hexadecimal and binary numbers now are supported in the calculator plugin.
• Terminal plugin performance boost.
• Terminal will now be found via the Program plugin again.
• Shutdown command is now using hybrid fast argument for shutting down
• Support for VSCodium with VS Code workplace plugin.

Video conference mute

• nVidia Broadcast software won’t crash anymore

Settings

• Upgrade notes in OOBE
• Fix for settings being lost (This was a hotfix for 0.55)
• UX improvements.

Installer

• Believe we have a fix for the long hated “app.dark.png is missing” error.
• Installer will launch PowerToys under appropriate elevation versus Admin only due to UAC prompt for installation (This was a hotfix for 0.55)
• PowerToys will now start if installed under different user

Development

• ARM64 – We removed the last .NET Framework dependency.
• .NET 6 upgrade, now on the newest and hottest .NET runtime
• Code analyzers have been upgraded!
• Symbols are back!
• Code refactoring.
• We are now on VS 2022 with the .NET 6 upgrade.

For more details and downloads, head over to GitHub.

– Microsoft Says SSD and 8GB RAM Required (Recommends 16GB) to Run Android Apps on Windows 11

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