PowerToys for Windows Reaches Version 0.14: PowerRename and FancyZones Enhancements Coming

Surely many of you have heard of PowerToys, an add-on that took its first steps with Windows 95 and Windows XP but that until now, after quite some time, it has not come to life through the latest update released by Microsoft: Windows 10 November 2019 Update.

With this name we refer to a set of free applications or programs that allow the user to add certain extras to the operating system in form of new functionalities with which to expand its possibilities.

PowerToys Version 0.14

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Despite the name and what it suggests, these are tools designed to enhance the Windows operating system, special functions whose use is recommended above all for advanced users and incidentally to avoid having to touch the Windows Registry . And 17 years later, a new version arrives, version 0.14 of the package with improvements and new tools: PowerRename, FancyZones and Shortcut "

PowerRename

PowerRename is a Windows Shell extension for renaming different files and doing them en masse For this we will do a search and replacement or regular expressions. It can be changed and search for simple or more advanced regular expression matching. This version adds these changes and improvements:

• You can change the size of the dialog.
• Added settings to restore the search and replace the value of flags from the previous run.
• Added settings to enable auto-completion and auto-suggest.
• Fixed and improved RegEx replacement output.
• Fixed a bug that prevented renaming items in the subfolder if the parent folder was also renamed.

FancyZones

The FancyZones tool is much like a window manager that makes it easy to create complex window layouts and quickly position windows windows in those designs. This update adds these enhancements:

• The legacy editor has been removed.
• Added a setting to disable FanzyZones for the user defined app list.
• The editor now opens highlighting the currently active layout.
• Displays the correct keyboard key for the editor shortcut.
• Fixed FancyZones bug stealing number keys.
• Fixed a DPI scaling bug in the FancyZones editor that caused zones to be placed in the wrong position on the screen.
• Fixed a bug that prevented several applications from working with FancyZones, although there are still some cases, such as remote applications, that may not work.
• Fixed a bug in the corridor that caused the tray icon to not appear.
• minor UI tweaks to Setup appearance (icon position and margins, module description text, and documentation link position and margins).
• Fixed a crash in SortcutGuide.

Shortcut

The Shortcut tool is a kind of guide to Windows key shortcuts: the shortcut guide appears when a user holds down the Windows key for more than one second and displays the available shortcuts for the current desktop state.

For those users who are interested in trying out these tools, they can be accessed from this link on GitHub. And although they have planned support for ARM64, for now they can only be tested with x64-based systems.