Microsoft has released PowerToys 0.21.1 with a bunch of bug fixes, a little more than a month after releasing major version 0.20 that brought a new Color Picker feature. With version 0.21, the firm says that the focus was on putting out a release aimed at “stability, localization, and quality of life improvements for both the development team and our end users”.
The fixes bring improvements to features such as Run, FancyZones, accessibility improvements, and more. The PowerToys Run tool also adds support for URLs and brings performance improvements to the speed of results displayed.
Interestingly, this is not the only version being released today, as the Redmond giant has also introduced a pre-release version of the tool to GitHub. PowerToys version 0.22, which the firm calls an “experimental” version, brings a new ‘Video conference mute’ feature that can be used to globally mute video calls from anywhere in the system, negating the need to navigate to the relevant app. The feature lets users mute both audio and video.
The feature adds a quick toggle UI that can be used to mute audio and video. There are also shortcut keys to help perform the actions:
- Win+N to toggle both Audio and Video at the same time
- Win+Shift+O to toggle video
- Win+Shift+A to toggle microphone
As for version 0.21.1, here is the complete list of fixes:
PT Run:
- Removed need for space in action keywords. This means you now can type >ipconfig
- Icon caches fixed and now has colored icons
- Improved font rendering via ClearType (Shout out to @AnuthaDev doing the heavy lifting here)
- Result speed improvements
- URLs are supported
- Fixed bugs including calculating bugs
FancyZone:
- Win+Arrow key is directional based on zone rect
- Fixed bugs
Runner:
- Fixed toast notifications running elevated from non-admin account
Shortcut Guide:
- Improved vkey catching which will fix some use cases of it not showing up
SVG in File Explorer:
- Embedded image tags will now render in Explorer
Color Picker:
- Fixed bug where it would launch via false positive keystrokes
Accessibility:
- Settings, PT Run and KBM undergoing improvements
Localization:
- Pipeline is now setup and will be doing a full E2E pass on all utilities shortly.
Dev quality of life improvements:
- Continued warning count reduction. This release ~80 removed
- StyleCop enabled E2E
- FxCop starting to be added in E2E
With the pandemic leading to more users working remotely and attending meetings remotely, the addition of a quick toggle is a nifty feature. However, there are a few known issues with the tool currently, which the company has listed on a separate page here.
Those that are interested to install the experimental version can head to the release page on GitHub to download the tool. Additionally, you can head to the issues page to look at the commit history and known issues for version 0.21.
