The latest Microsoft PowerToys update improves several of its utilities and introduces a module to allow you to select an area in a window to keep only the essentials displayed on the screen.
Microsoft has just updated its PowerToys to version 0.73. On the program for this new version, the Redmond firm has improved several modules of its toolkit, but above all has introduced a new, extremely practical tool. Crop and lock, that’s its name, allows you to open a specific area of one of your windows in an independent window to keep it displayed on the screen.
A shortcut to create thumbnails of your active windows
When you use certain applications on your PC, you often only interact within a limited area of the window in which it is open. Thus, to avoid having to reopen a window in its entirety, the Crop and lock module allows you, using a shortcut, to create, in another window, a thumbnail of the area with which you interact usually.
To fully understand what it is all about, nothing better than to take an example. If you’re listening to a playlist in your favorite streaming music app, you probably open the entire window of it to access the media control buttons. Using the shortcut Windows + Ctrl + Shift + T, you can select an area of the window to open it in an independent window which will remain displayed on top of all the others. Here in this case, the function makes it possible to keep on the screen only the area in which the player control buttons are displayed. Note, however, that when using Crop and Lock, you must keep the parent window open in the background to keep the cropped window active.
In the settings of the Crop and lock module, a second shortcut is also available. This one, which is activated by using the key combination Windows + Ctrl + Shift + R offers to do the same thing, but in the original window. This shortcut, still in the test phase, is however still very wobbly and does not work with all applications.
New in Keyboard Manager, FancyZones, ImageResizer and PowerRename
Besides the introduction of Crop and Lock, developers working on the PowerToys took advantage of this update to make improvements in several existing modules. Thus, Keyboard Manager, the tool that allows you to remap the keys on your keyboard, now supports the numeric keypad. FancyZones, the module that allows you to create window layouts, has seen its code optimized. Finally, the developers have also set about modernizing the user experience of Image Reziser, the image resizing utility.
Source :
Microsoft