Powertoys: Save/Restore Settings?

[LostMarbals]

Summary of the new feature/enhancement

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

[crutkas]

can you explain a bit more about your use case here?

[LostMarbals]

Hi Clint, thanks for asking!

So essentially I came to this thought as I have three separate monitors and am an avid FancyZones user (thanks by the way!).

I have 2 zones on one monitor, 4 zones on another and 5 on the third. That’s a lot of zones! And you might imagine it took quite some tweaking to get things just how I like them.

Now imagine that I have to reinstall windows on my machine, or I get a new machine (but keep the hefty investment in displays) or heck FancyZones just forgets all my zones (this was more common in 0.14 and has thankfully abated).

It sure would be nice if in any of these circumstances I can simply click a button that says “import fancy zone settings” point it to an .xml or .ini file that PowerToys can use to instantly set up my FancyZones just the way I had them. This would of course necessitate an export option as well which I could do when I have things set up just so.

I could even potentially export different settings for different situations. For instance when I go into the local business office here I use a touchdown space that had two external monitors, but they’re both small and horizontally oriented. (My home rig has a vertical oriented monitor for Outlook). I could just load “touchdownspace.xml” and be all set. When I’m travelling for customer work I pack a portal external display. I could have a “Travel.xml” that I load up. And when I’m just at the Starbucks chilling, it would be nice to load up the “MobileDisplayOnly.xml”. When I get home … back to “home.xml”.

Essentially this amounts to display profiles. I suppose you could build into the app the ability to store and display them, but I thought it might just be easier to dump them out as XMLs.

So losing your PowerToys config for any reason and working in multiple locations would be the two use cases I could see being most common for me anyway.

Does that help?

[WreckWren]

+1 for this, even just telling us the location of the config files would be helpful. I have several complicated zones I need to move to the office.

[Jay-o-Way]

A REG or INI file would be nice indeed. Not only as a back-up, but also for applying the same settings ion multiple devices.

[MrBliz]

Absolutely, being able to export the settings would be fantastic.

[wolf99]

Settings export (and import) for all of the power toys would be good. I don't use Fancy Zones, but I do have settings set for some of the other toys that I would like to be able to backup and restore.

[rhorber]

I came across the same issue as I am getting a new device. After reading the comment from WreckWren I searched for the config files.

They are stored under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\PowerToys. (FYI: @WreckWren)
The custom zones can be found in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\PowerToys\FancyZones\zones-settings.json under custom-zone-sets.

To restore a zone I did the following (hope this is useful to someone):

• Close PowerToys
• Backup %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\PowerToys\FancyZones\zones-settings.json on the target machine; if manual editing causes a syntax error, the file will be emptied
• Insert the zones to restore into the custom-zone-sets property
• Open PowerToys again, the zones should show up in the Zones Editor

[LostMarbals]

This is actually super useful. I will see if I can set this up with my backup laptop for the multiple device use case and create different settings for the different work locations use case. I don’t juggling JSON configs as a solution. I know it’s a lot to ask to create big interface changes to make them easy to switch between active and non-active config files.

Respectfully,

[crutkas]

Great feedback, Tracked in #586