PowerToys update saves you hassle of installing .NET

What you need to know

• Microsoft's PowerToys just received an update to version 0.66.0.
• The update includes a lengthy list of changes and improvements.
• PowerToys now ships with a self-contained .NET 7, which means people don't need to install .NET when initially installing the app.

Following a brief holiday break, many of Microsoft's apps are receiving updates this week. PowerToys 0.66 was just bumped to version 0.66.0, which includes several fixes, changes, and improvements. The most notable change is that PowerToys now ships with self-contained .NET 7. That means that users don't need to install .NET through the app's installer. The change makes it easier to keep the app up to date as well.

It's been a while since we've seen an update to PowerToys, so the change log on GitHub is rather long.

PowerToys v0.66.0

Highlights

• PowerToy utilities now ship with self-contained .NET 7, meaning it's not necessary to install .NET as part of the installer and it's easier to keep up to date.
• It's possible to pick which of the installed OCR languages is used by Text Extractor by selecting it in the right-click context menu.
• Added a setting to sort the order of the accented characters by usage frequency in Quick Accent.

General

• Reduced resource consumption caused by logging. A thread for each logger was being created even for disabled utilities.
• The .NET 7 dependency is now shipped self-contained within the utilities, using deep links to reduce storage space usage.

Color Picker

• Fixed an issue where the custom color formats were not working when picking colors without using the editor.
• Fixed a crash when using duplicated names for color formats.
• Added two decimal formats, to distinguish between RGB and BGR.
• Fixed color name localization, which was not working correctly on 0.65.

FancyZones

• Fixed an editor crash caused by deleting a zone while trying to move it.
• Reduce the time it takes the tooltip for layout shortcut setting to appear in the editor.

File Locksmith

• Fixed an issue causing File Locksmith to hang when looking for open handles in some machines.

Hosts File Editor

• Added a warning when duplicated entries are detected. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

PowerToys Run

• Support drag and dropping for file results. Thanks @daniel-richter!

Quick Accent

• Added support for dark theme. Thanks @niels9001!
• Increased default input delay to improve out of the box experience.
• Fixed a bug causing the first character to not be selected when opening the overlay. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
• Fixed the positioning of the overlay when showing near the horizontal edges of the screen.
• Added additional Pinyin characters. Thanks @char-46!
• Added Macedonian characters. Thanks @ad-mca-mk!
• Added a setting to sort characters by usage frequency.
• Added a setting to always start selection in the first character, even when using the arrow keys as the activation method.

Settings

• Fixed an error that hid the option to keep the display on when using the "Indefinitely Awake" mode.
• Fixed an accessibility issue causing the navigation bar to not work with narrator in scan mode.
• Fixed an accessibility issue where the name for the shortcut control was not being read correctly.
• Tweaked the Color Picker custom color format UI. Thanks @niels9001!
• Improved the shortcut control visibility and accessibility. Thanks @niels9001!
• Fixed an issue causing the Settings to not be saved correctly on scenarios where the admin user would be different then the user running PowerToys.
• Added a setting to pick which language should be used by default when using Text Extractor.

Text Extractor

• Improve behavior for CJK languages by not adding spaces for some characters that don't need them. Thanks @AO2233!
• OCR language can now be picked in the right-click context menu.

Video Conference Mute

• Reduced resource consumption by not starting the File Watchers when the utility is disabled.

Documentation

• Updated the development setup documentation.
• Improved the Markdown documentation lists numbering in many docs. Thanks @sanidhyas3s!

Development

• Turned on C++ code analysis and incrementally fixing warnings.
• C++ code analysis no longer runs on release CI to speed up building release candidates. It still runs on GitHub CI and when building locally to maintain code quality.
• Cleaned up "to-do" comments referring to disposing memory on C#. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
• Added a fabric bot rule for localization issues.
• Fixed a CI build error after a .NET tools update.
• Update the Windows App SDK dependency version to 1.2.
• When building for arm64, the arm64 build tools are now preferred when building on an arm64 device. Thanks @snickler!
• Updated the C# test framework and removed unused Newtonsoft.Json package references.
• Updated StyleCop and fixed/enabled more warnings. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
• Fixed a language typo in the code. Thanks @eltociear!
• Improved code quality around some silent crashes that were being reported to Microsoft servers.
• Moved the GPO asset files to source instead of docs in the repo.
• Upgraded the unit test NuGet packages.

PowerToys | Free at Microsoft | GitHub

PowerToys is a powerful utility that adds a long list of tools to Windows. It just received its first update of 2023, which includes several changes and improvements.