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.

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