All right, everyone.
Fancy zones, power toys, four minutes.
I'm going to break down everything you need to know about my favorite
feature, enabling you to build custom layout with rows and columns
to snap your windows to so tune in.
Hey everyone.
I'm James.
And I'm back with a shorter video this time, all about fancy
zones inside of power toys.
One of my favorite applications on windows as a developer,
and also as a user of windows.
Now I did a long form version of this and that is not going to be this.
I'm going to try to break down everything in just a few minutes.
So let's get started.
The first thing you need to do is install power toys.
This is going to enable you to get a whole bunch of utilities, including
fancy zones in salt, power toys from.
Or if you want to head into the Microsoft store and search for power toys,
that's going to give you everything you need to get started installing and
streamlining your windows 10 and windows 11 experience with awesome snapping.
All right.
Now, once you have that, you're going to get this a welcome to power toys.
It'll give you an overview of all the features, including fancy zones, which.
Now, this just comes up once.
And what you'll normally see is the settings window here.
And this is what you'll see when you launch power toys, enabling you to check
for updates and run your application.
And I like specifically to always run it.
Start-up especially with fancy zones over here is fancy zones, and this is going
to enable you to enable it customized.
Tweak to tweak the settings and optimize layouts to your liking.
So what is a fancy zone?
Well, I'm going to hold down shift and start to move this around.
I can easily come in with shift, automatically decide where my windows are.
If I get rid of shift and boom, it's good to go.
If I open another application.
Boom, snap it immediately snap it immediately.
Just like that.
I'm able to create a custom layout on my windows machine.
So how do I do that?
Well, we're going to get into the edit and the layout, but I want to show you
that you can completely customize it here.
The layout zones, you hold down shift to activate that zone.
You can also use a non-primary mouse to toggle zone activation
too, which is really nice.
And there's all sorts of customization here.
The zone appearance, the opacity that.
Here you can customize the window behavior.
I mean, there is fine tuning to exact likings that you want inside of here.
You can do windows switching with page up and page down with the windows key,
and you can customize this to you can override windows, snap, and you can even
enable quick layout switch and flash those zones when foot switching lanes.
Finally over here, you can exclude apps if you never want that to happen,
but let's go into the most important section here, which is the layout editor.
Now, what we see here is that there's a bunch of templates that ship
with power toys and fancy zones.
So here, if I want to, I can come in and look at our priority grid and see right
here that this is now my priority grid.
If I wanted normal grid or rows, just like that we have this set up.
Now, the other thing I'll note here is that there's spacing in here by default.
Some people don't want that.
So hit that edit button and you'll be able to toggle that on and off.
See that right there on and off, you can enable more zones or less zones inside
of here, but these are the templates, so they don't let you modify it too
much besides that spacing, but you can duplicate it or you can create your own.
Now this enables you to have a custom layout with a grid or canvas, which
enables you to have overlapping zones.
If you want to get real fancy with it, now I'm going to do
a grid and we're gonna hit.
Now, this is a little floating box.
That's important information, but definitely leave that open.
If you save and apply, it's going to come back to this screen.
And what you will need to do is either right click and say, edit zones, or click
this edit button and then edit it again.
Now I want to show you that you can also set layout, shortcut keys there too.
And of course, turn on and off that space.
So.
All right, let's edit this.
And now what I'm going to do is notice here that I can come in and automatically
fancy zones is telling me to split this.
Just like.
That's pretty cool.
If I want to reunite these, I'm just going to drag the zones together and hit merge.
I love that.
It tells me my pixel density there.
So I get everything I want.
If I'm doing recordings, I can split this up into three zones.
I can move things around everything that I want to get real customized there.
Now, let's say that you want to not split this like this.
You want to split it the other way, hold down the shift and boom,
you're splitting it the other way automatically, which is super nice.
And again, I can come in merge these together and just like that I've created
my own fancy zone and hit, save and apply.
Now, when I exit out of here and I bring back up applications, I can snap
them to all of my windows, just like.
And this is a thing of beauty, especially when you're developing,
using a lot of tools, doing anything inside of your machine.
Now, of course, there's tons of options inside of fancy zones.
So be sure to come in and really look around at all of the little
options that you have available, but I love fancy zones so much.
Look at this.
It just amazing.
All right.
That's fancy zones.
And just a few minutes, I hope that you enjoy this little tutorial.
And if you have any questions about fancy zones, leave them
below and I'll get back to you.
And of course, install it from docs or from the store.
And if you liked this video, give it a thumbs up and jam that subscribe button,
because I have more developer tips and also windows tips and tricks here,
right on my channel every single week.
Thanks for watching.