Fans of Microsoft's PowerToys suite of tools have some good news today, as the company is now rolling out version 0.64 of the app. The latest release comes with a couple of major additions, the File Locksmith and Hosts File Editor.
File Locksmith is potentially the more interesting one of the two, and really, it can be useful for anyone. You've probably had a situation where you tried to delete a file but Windows showed you an error, claiming that the file can't be deleted because it's being used by another app. With File Locksmith, you can find out what that app is. That way, you can easily terminate the process so you can delete the file, so this is bound to be a great help for a lot of people.
The other addition is a bit more self-explanatory. With the Hosts File Editor tool, you can edit the Hosts file in Windows 11 (or 10) using a proper editor UI, rather than having to use the Notepad. The Hosts file lets you block certain domains from being accessed, for example, and having this UI should make it a bit less daunting to make changes to it.
Even beyond these two new tools, however, there are some great news in this update. The PowerToys settings now include a new feature that let you export or import your current settings from a file, so you can more easily migrate your settings across devices as needed.
Additionally, Microsoft has made improvements to FancyZones so that you can set default behaviors for horizontal and vertical screens. This is because, in some cases, monitor IDs can get reset, and the FancyZones settings don't apply anymore. With this fix, even if that happens, your layouts should at still make some sense based on the screen orientation.
There are a lot of smaller fixes and improvements in PowerToys version 0.64, so if you want the full list, you can check it out below.
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Detect and put a window on top again if it's no longer on top.
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Added a way for users to configure default layouts for horizontal and vertical screens.
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Replaced remaning Number Boxes in FancyZones Editor with Sliders, to improve accessibility for screen readers.
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Fixed an issue breaking window switching shortcuts.
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Added a new utility: File Locksmith.
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Thanks @niels9001 for the design on the UI!
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Group Policy Objects settings for force disabling and enabling PowerToys utilities.
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Thanks @htcfreek for your help in reviewing to make sure the shipped settings conform to system administrators expectations!
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Added a new utility: Hosts File Editor. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
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Thanks @niels9001 for the design help on the UI!
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Thanks @davidegiacometti for fixing the bugs found and adding features up until release!
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Thanks @AtariDreams for consolidating the packages comparing to the rest of the project!
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Thanks @htcfreek for adding a scrollviewer to the entry editor!
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Fixed a delay that was not being cancelled properly. Thanks @AtariDreams!
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Changed image loading to release the images in PowerToys Run main executable. This is a try to fix the "app.dark.png" missing issues received after a PowerToys update.
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Fixed the PowerToys Run hiding after the default action failed. Thanks @hlaueriksson!
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Fixed the PowerToys Run allows showing after a context menu action succeeded. Thanks @hlaueriksson!
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Corrected "Dutch" word to "German". Thanks @damienleroy!
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Added the Portuguese language accents. Thanks @pcanavar!
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Fixed positioning of toolbar on scaled desktops.
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Improved the acrylic brush used in the menu. Thanks @niels9001!
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Added a feature to backup/restore settings to/from a file. Thanks @jefflord!
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Fixed an issue causing shortcuts shown in OOBE not updating to new values when the window was re-opened.
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Fixed the "Documents" folder usage in the backup/restore feature. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
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Added a warning about how to install languages for OCR recognition.
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Fixed the overlay not focusing after the first activation.
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Added spaces between CJK and non-CKJ words. Thanks @maggch97!
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Added a setting to hide the Video Conference Mute overlay when muted. Thanks @akabhirav!
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Added a warning about deprecating Video Conference Mute in the future (v0.67), please check #21473 for more information.
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Added some missing files that were causing Settings and PowerRename to not function correctly on some configurations.
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Updated the .NET dependency to 6.0.10.
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Consolidated nuget packages and removed a few unused packages.
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Updated the Windows.CppRT to the latest version. Thanks @AtariDreams!
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Removed the cxxopts dependency, which was no longer used. Thanks @AtariDreams!
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Updated the cziplob dependency to 0.25. Thanks @AtariDreams!
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Updated the System.IO.Abstractions dependency. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
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Turned on C++ code analysis and incrementally fixing warnings.
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Added the install method to the issue template on GitHub, since some issues seem to be related to specific installation methods.
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Automated installer hash creation in the release CI.
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Simplified use of
.First()
on ImageResizer. Thanks @AtariDreams!
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Improved and clarified the issues templates. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!
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Fixed a PTRun unit test to be more compatible with .NET 6. Thanks @AtariDreams!
There are some known issues in this release, too, including the Text Extractor sometimes not recognizing text on Arm64-based devices, or some users in very specific instances not being able to open the PowerToys settings, which happens because of conflicts with other apps. Microsoft also warns that after installing PowerToys, the context menu entries for PowerRename and Image Resizer may not show up until you restart the PC.
If those problems aren't major to you, you can download PowerToys version 0.64 from GitHub here. If you already have PowerToys installed, you can check for updates in the app's settings, or it will eventually notify you about the update.