In the era of Windows 95, Microsoft had a series of tools designed to improve productivity and the way users work: its well-known PowerToys . After many years of neglect and neglect, the company decided to resurrect them as a suite of open source applications to improve productivity and the way you work with Windows. And today, these apps receive a major update.
Although Microsoft continues to work on new tools that may be useful to users, the applications that today are part of the PowerToys suite are:
- Awake : allows generating false activity on the PC to prevent it from being suspended.
- Color selector : allows you to select the hexadecimal code of any color that we see on the screen.
- FancyZones : divide the screen into several customizable parts to anchor any window within them as if they were virtual monitors.
- Browser plugins : SVG and Markdown preview.
- Image resizing: allows you to batch resize and process images, from the context menu.
- Keyboard manager : allows us to reassign the operation of any key on the keyboard, change shortcuts and create new ones.
- PowerRename : tool to rename, in a massive way, many files at the same time.
- Run : minimalist, fast and simple application launcher.
- Keyboard shortcut guide : allows us to know the most common keyboard shortcuts in Windows.
What’s new in version 0.43
This new version is mainly focused on fixing bugs and improving existing tools. The first general changes that we are going to find are some general changes to make the program compatible with Windows 11 standards, support for URIs to be executed by HTTPS and not HTTP and a new dialog box when executing commands from Run.
Then each tool has its own corrections. For example, the general program interface improves the view of some settings, such as Image Resizer, and adds name and alternative text to the program’s startup GIF. In addition, it corrects several errors detected in the main configuration panels of the tool, most of them aesthetic.
Awake fixes high CPU consumption and improves the tool’s context menu. Unfortunately, it has also added telemetry, and will now send the settings to Microsoft. The color picker removes private Unicode Chars from names, corrects scaling, and fixes a number of bugs detected and reported by users. FancyZones fixes an issue when using it on multiple monitors, adds a minimum size limit, and fixes other bugs that were affecting users. The keyboard manager fixes various reading errors to be more intuitive. And finally, Run improves launch speed and fixes various bugs that could cause unexpected shutdowns.
We can see the complete list of the changes of this version in this link .
Download PowerToys 0.43
Users who already have this program installed on Windows will see a notice very soon informing them of the availability of this new version. We can also use the program to check for updates and receive, without waiting, these new PowerToys.
In case you don’t have this tool installed yet, we can download it for free from the link we shared before, on GitHub .
