Software update: PowerToys 0.15.1

Microsoft has released a new version of PowerToys. The PowerToys are a collection of small programs for power users. There were PowerToys for Windows 95 and Windows XP and not too long ago Microsoft also started developing a version for Windows 10. At the moment there are only three programs left in the collection, namely FancyZonesWindows key shortcut guide and PowerRename, more are in the pipeline. The release notes for this version can be found below.

Current PowerToy Utilities

• FancyZones – FancyZones is a window manager that makes it easy to create complex window layouts and quickly position windows into those layouts.
• Windows key shortcut guide – The shortcut guide appears when a user holds the Windows key down for more than one second and shows the available shortcuts for the current state of the desktop.
• Windows key shortcut guide – PowerRename is a Windows Shell Extension for advanced bulk renaming using search and replace or regular expressions.

Below are just a few of the bullet items from this release.

• Make you aware there is a new version from within PowerToys
• Removed requirement to always ‘run as admin’
• Added almost 300 unit tests to increase stability and prevent regressions.
• Resolved almost 100 issues
• Made .NET Framework parts of the source run faster with NGEN
• Improved for how we store data locally
• Increased FancyZones compatibility with applications
• Initial work for 4 new PowerToys added for 0.16!
• Created the v1.0 strategy, the launcher, the keyboard manager specs
• Work on cleaning up our issue backlog and labels

Power Toys 0.16
For 0.16, we have some fun things planned and hopefully will be able to ship pretty quickly. Here are the new utilities we’ll enable:

• An alternative to Alt-Tab PowerToy
• SVG preview pane for support Explorer
• Markdown preview pane support for Explorer
• Image Resizer PowerToy

Windows key shortcut guide in PowerToys.