Microsoft releases PowerToys v0.63 with loads of fixes and a significantly smaller installer

It is only a few days since we learned that Microsoft is working on a great new PowerToys utility called File LockSmith. This particular tool is not quite ready yet but in the meantime we have PowerToys v0.63 to enjoy.

For the v0.63 release cycle, the PowerToys development team says that it is "focused on stability and improvement". While this may not sound overly enticing, the release of PowerToys v0.63 is an important one. In addition to introducing a large number of fixes, this latest update not only makes steps towards eliminating the UAC prompt during installation, but also greatly reduces the size of the installer.

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The PowerToys team has been able to reduce the size of the software quite significantly. In the release notes, the team explains: "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".

The developers pick out just one other highlight for this release -- the addition of a new setting to select a language in QuickAccent, helping to reduce the number of accented characters a user needs to pick from -- but this does PowerToys v0.63 something of a disservice. The full changelog reveals that it contains much more:

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 v0.63 here, or use the update option of the version you have installed at the moment.