Microsoft has released version 0.63 of its PowerToys suite of productivity tools, and this one is more of a refinement update. While it doesn’t add a lot of new features, this version of PowerToys does come with some major improvements in terms of efficiency. The team has reduced the size of the PowerToys installer from 125MB (in version 0.62.1) to just 83MB. And, once installed, the app now takes up just 587MB instead of 817MB.
Microsoft says it achieved this by sharing files like the Windows App SDK, VC++ Redistributable, and PowerToys Interop between the different tools. This should also help in removing the requirement for user account control (UAC) during the install process, though there’s still work to be done before that can happen. Next, the company will also be shipping a self-contained version of .NET that’s shared between the different utilities.
Another highlight of this release is that the QuickAccent tool, which lets you quickly find accented versions of characters, now lets you choose a language so as to reduce the number of characters you need to choose from when typing.
Aside from that, this release is mostly focused on fixes and minor improvements, and there are a lot of them for the various utilities included in PowerToys. You can find a full list of those below.
PowerToys 0.63 changelog
Known issues
General
- Fixed an issue that caused bug report generation to fail. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
- Updated the Windows App SDK runtimes to 1.1.5.
Always on Top
- Fixed an issue causing the border to linger when moving a window between virtual desktops.
- The minimum thickness for the borders is now 1. Thanks @unuing!
- Borders were showing in Virtual Desktop thumbnails. These were removed.
- Corrected the borders visuals to more closely follow the application borders.
Awake
- Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
Color Picker
- Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
- Fixed initialization error that caused the mouse position to be incorrectly set.
FancyZones
- Fixed FancyZones Editor exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
File explorer add-ons
- Updated the WebView 2 dependency to 1.0.1343.22. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!
- Fixed preview of .reg files.
Image Resizer
- Fixed a bug causing File Explorer to crash under some conditions when accessing the context menu.
PowerToys Run
- Added support to opening Terminal windows in quake mode. Thanks @FWest98!
- Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
- Improve the icon shown in the Program plugin for application execution aliases. Thanks @MikeBarker-MSFT!
- Fix calls to the default browser when Firefox is installed from the Microsoft Store.
- Fixed accessibility issue in which controls appended to the result entries weren’t announced.
- Search was improved and should now return results where the terms in the query appear at the end of the result.
Quick Accent
- Improved the keyboard hooks performance. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
- Fixed a bug that was causing Quick Accent to interfere with Keyboard Manager. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
- Added the correct ß uppercase character. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!
- Accent character selection should now wrap around. Thanks @wmentha!
- Added language selection setting to reduce the number of accented characters shown. The available languages are Currency, Czech, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Maori, Pinyin, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Spanish and Turkish. Thanks @damienleroy!
Screen Ruler
- Improved UI/UX and settings descriptions.
- Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
Settings
- UI icons updated. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!
- Descriptions improvement and disambiguation. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!
- Fixed checkbox margins and other design tweaks. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!
Text Extractor
- Removed extra spaces when recognizing Chinese, Japanese or Korean languages. Thanks @TheJoeFin!
- Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)
- Fixed an issue where a selection would start on right-click.
Installer
- Added logic to exit PowerToys on upgrade before trying to update .NET.
- Updated the .NET dependency to 6.0.9.
- Added clearer installation step names for the bootstrapper. Thanks @htcfreek and @Jay-o-Way!
- Windows App SDK, VC++ redistributable and PowerToys Interop runtime files are now shared between utilities through hardlinks, reducing installation size.
Documentation
- Fixed typos in Keyboard Manager documentation. Thanks @eltociear!
- Replaced docs.microsoft.com links with learn.microsoft.com. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!
Development
- Fixed a build error that was restricting developers to switch between configuration without first cleaning local build files.
- C++ exception catches were corrected to be caught by reference to avoid unnecessary copy operations. Thanks @NN—!
- General C# code clean up, format fixing and removal of unused code analysis suppressions.
- Removed unnecessary
muxcprefix from XAML files. Thanks @Jay-o-Way! - Re-enabled tests on our pipeline that depend on WebView2.
- Windows 11 tier 1 context menu packages now contain the “Microsoft.PowerToys” prefix.
There are a couple of tools known to be in the works that aren’t in this release, however. Microsoft engineer Clint Rutkas recently shared a look at a “file locksmith” tool, which lets you see what processes are using a given file, which can prevent that file from being deleted. We’ve also seen a demo of PowerToys Peek in the past, which would act like a Windows version of Quick Look in macOS. These tools have yet to appear in a PowerToys release, but hopefully they’re still coming soon.
Source: GitHub