Back in Windows 95 days, Microsoft offered a range of utilities under the ‘PowerToys’ brand. Fast forward to 2019 and there’s now a new batch of PowerToys being developed, this reboot provides power users with ways to squeeze more efficiency out of the Windows 10 shell and customize it for individual workflows.
One of the utilities is called FancyZones and it addresses functionality I’ve been asking for from Windows over a number of years.
As we move to higher resolution displays, 4K, 8K etc, we need many more snap points for windows than the simple quad snaps available in Windows 10 out of the box.
In the past couple of years, we’ve also seen new Super Ultrawide displays enter the market, that replaces 2 monitors with a single one. This means you’d love to have 3 or 4 vertical snap points for applications as the display is far wider than it is tall.
Thankfully FancyZones offers you the ability to customise the snap points however the hell you want. This level of flexibility is incredibly useful and switching between different layouts based on the type of work you’re doing is just brilliant.
You can install the first preview release (v0.11.0) from GitHub now. If you’re a developer type, you can download the code and modify to your heart’s content.
Once installed, you can open PowerToys from the system tray. Each PowerToy gets its own settings screen. The FancyZones settings allow you to Edit the zones in the Zone Configurator to exactly what you want. There’s an almost infinite number of vertical and horizontal slices you can create and then slice those in half.
Day-to-day, you can simply press the Shift key when you’re dragging a Window and it’ll show you the snap points of your current layout. This means it doesn’t interact or interfere with the standard 50/50 or quadrant snaps built-into Windows 10.
After using FacyZones for a few days now, it really feels like a feature that’d be perfect to slip into Windows 10 for real, it’s better in every way than the default snapping.
Below is a tutorial that shows the level of customisation options available, and how easy FancyZones is to use.
