It’s update time for those using PowerToys on Windows 10 and 11. Version 0.66.0 is now available for download with many fixes, improvements and minor changes. This release includes .NET 7 standalone, meaning it is no longer required to install it standalone before PowerToys will work. If you’ve been waiting for the fancy Quick Access Launcher, you’ll have to wait for a future version, as it hasn’t been added yet. But luckily, there are no known issues with the distribution.

Here are the main points of the update:

highlights

• The PowerToy utilities now ship with standalone .NET 7, meaning that .NET does not need to be installed as part of the installation and is easier to update.
• You can choose which of the installed OCR languages ​​the Text Extractor uses by selecting it in the right-click context menu.
• Added a setting to sort the order of accented characters by frequency of use in Quick Accent.

There are no known issues with this release.

And here’s your in-depth changelog with improvements and changes to existing toys:

general

• Reduced resource consumption caused by logging. A thread is created for each logger even for disabled utilities.

• .NET 7 dependencies are now shipped independently within the utility, using deep links to reduce storage usage.

Choose colors

• Fixed an issue where the custom color formats did not work when selecting colors without using the editor.

• Fixed crash when using duplicate names for color formats.

• Added two decimal formats, to distinguish between RGB and BGR.

• Fixed color name localization not working properly in 0.65.

FancyZones

file lock

Hosts File Editor

PowerToys Run

quick accent

• Added support for dark theme. Thanks @niels9001!

• Increased input delay set by default to improve the out-of-the-box experience.

• Fixed a bug that caused the first character not to be selected when opening the overlay. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

• Fixed the position of the overlay when displaying near the horizontal edges of the screen.

• Added more pinyin characters. Thanks @char-46!

• Added Macedonian characters. Thanks @ad-mca-mk!

• Added definition for sorting characters by frequency of use.

• Added a setting to always start the selection with the first character, even when using the arrow keys as the activation method.

Settings

• Fixed a bug that hid the option to keep the display on when using “Awake Indefinitely” mode.

• Fixed an accessibility issue that caused the navigation bar to not work with Narrator in scan mode.

• Fixed an accessibility issue where the name of the shortcut control was not being read correctly.

• Improved the custom color format user interface of the color picker. Thanks @niels9001!

• Improving the visibility and accessibility of the shortcut control. Thanks @niels9001!

• Fixed an issue that caused settings to not be saved correctly in scenarios where the admin user is different from the user running PowerToys.

• Added setting to choose which language to use as default when using Text Extractor.

text extractor

• Improve the behavior of CJK languages ​​by not adding spaces for certain characters that don’t need them. Thanks @AO2233!

• You can now select an OCR language in the right-click context menu.

Muting a video conference

Documentation

• Update the development setup documentation.

• Improved the numbering of Markdown documentation lists in many documents. Thanks @sanidhyas3s!

development

• Enabling C++ code analysis and patching warnings incrementally.

• C++ code analysis no longer runs on CI version to speed up release candidate builds. It still runs on GitHub CI and when building locally to maintain code quality.

• Cleaned up “assignments” comments related to memory disposal in C#. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

• Added a cloth bot rule for localization issues.

• Fixed CI build error after updating .NET tools.

• Update Windows App SDK dependency version to 1.2.

• When building for arm64, the arm64 build tools are now preferred when building on an arm64 device. Thanks @snickler!

• Updated the C# test framework and removed references to unused Newtonsoft.Json packages.

• Updated StyleCop and fixed/enabled more warnings. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

• Fixed a language typo in the code. Thanks @eltociear!

• Improved code quality around some silent crashes reported to Microsoft servers.

• Moved GPO property files to source instead of docs in repo.

• Upgrade NuGet packages for unit testing.

You can download PowerToys From the Microsoft Storewing, or Its repository on GitHub.