PowerToys 0.63 is out with a much smaller installation footprint

Microsoft has released a fresh update for its set of Windows tools called PowerToys. Version 0.63 is now available for download with a new setting in Quick Accent to pick a language. The overall installed size for PowerToys on disk is also reduced from 817 MB to 587 MB, this is also reflected in a much smaller 83 MB setup file compared to 0.62's 125 MB. Plus you will find a bunch of fixes in this release.

What is new in PowerToys 0.63?

Highlights:

• Quick Accent contains a new setting to select a language. This should reduce the number of accented characters a user needs to pick from. Thanks @damienleroy!
• Reduced installer (125 MB in 0.62.1 compared to 83 MB in 0.63.0) and installed (817 MB in 0.62.1 compared to 587 MB in 0.63.0) sizes by sharing the Windows App SDK, VC++ redistributable and PowerToys Interop runtime files between utilities. This is a step towards removing the UAC requirement on install. The next step is shipping .NET self-contained and shared between utilities.

Known issues

• The Text Extractor utility fails to recognize text in some cases on ARM64 devices running Windows 10.

• After installing PowerToys, the new Windows 11 context menu entries for PowerRename and Image Resizer might not appear before a system restart.

• There are reports of users who are unable to open the Settings window. This is being caused by incompatibilities with some applications (RTSS RivaTuner Statistics Server and MSI AfterBurner are known examples of this). If you're affected by this, please check the linked issue to verify if any of the presented solutions works for you.

   

General

• Fixed an issue that caused bug report generation to fail. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

• Updated the Windows App SDK runtimes to 1.1.5.

   

Always on Top

• Fixed an issue causing the border to linger when moving a window between virtual desktops.

• The minimum thickness for the borders is now 1. Thanks @unuing!

• Borders were showing in Virtual Desktop thumbnails. These were removed.

• Corrected the borders visuals to more closely follow the application borders.

   

Awake

• Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

   

Color Picker

• Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

• Fixed initialization error that caused the mouse position to be incorrectly set.

   

FancyZones

• Fixed FancyZones Editor exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

   

File explorer add-ons

• Updated the WebView 2 dependency to 1.0.1343.22. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!

• Fixed preview of .reg files.

   

Image Resizer

• Fixed a bug causing File Explorer to crash under some conditions when accessing the context menu.

   

PowerToys Run

• Added support to opening Terminal windows in quake mode. Thanks @FWest98!

• Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

• Improve the icon shown in the Program plugin for application execution aliases. Thanks @MikeBarker-MSFT!

• Fix calls to the default browser when Firefox is installed from the Microsoft Store.

• Fixed accessibility issue in which controls appended to the result entries weren't announced.

• Search was improved and should now return results where the terms in the query appear at the end of the result.

   

Quick Accent

• Improved the keyboard hooks performance. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

• Fixed a bug that was causing Quick Accent to interfere with Keyboard Manager. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

• Added the correct ß uppercase character. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!

• Accent character selection should now wrap around. Thanks @wmentha!

• Added language selection setting to reduce the number of accented characters shown. The available languages are Currency, Czech, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Maori, Pinyin, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Spanish and Turkish. Thanks @damienleroy!

   

Screen Ruler

• Improved UI/UX and settings descriptions.

• Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

   

Settings

• UI icons updated. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!

• Descriptions improvement and disambiguation. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!

• Fixed checkbox margins and other design tweaks. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!

   

Text Extractor

• Removed extra spaces when recognizing Chinese, Japanese or Korean languages. Thanks @TheJoeFin!

• Fixed utility exit logic to close all threads and avoid crashes. (This was a hotfix for 0.62)

• Fixed an issue where a selection would start on right-click.

   

Installer

• Added logic to exit PowerToys on upgrade before trying to update .NET.

• Updated the .NET dependency to 6.0.9.

• Added clearer installation step names for the bootstrapper. Thanks @htcfreek and @Jay-o-Way!

• Windows App SDK, VC++ redistributable and PowerToys Interop runtime files are now shared between utilities through hardlinks, reducing installation size.

   

Documentation

• Fixed typos in Keyboard Manager documentation. Thanks @eltociear!

• Replaced docs.microsoft.com links with learn.microsoft.com. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!

   

Development

• Fixed a build error that was restricting developers to switch between configuration without first cleaning local build files.
• C++ exception catches were corrected to be caught by reference to avoid unnecessary copy operations. Thanks @NN---!
• General C# code clean up, format fixing and removal of unused code analysis suppressions.
• Removed unnecessary muxc prefix from XAML files. Thanks @Jay-o-Way!
• Re-enabled tests on our pipeline that depend on WebView2.
• Windows 11 tier 1 context menu packages now contain the "Microsoft.PowerToys" prefix.

You can download PowerToys 0.63 from the Microsoft Store or the app's GitHub repository.

PowerToys 0.63 is out with a much smaller installation footprint