Smaller FancyZones

[JunoGregoire]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

I'd like to be able to use smaller FancyZones. A software I use opens multiple (popup) windows and has 1 'home' window. The 'home window' has shortcuts at the top to all features and I want to be able to keep the 'home window' full screen, with a slightly smaller than full screen zone under it. Unfortunately I've run into a height limit for the FancyZones where the min height is still too high. I'd need a zone that's only 70 pix high, which is impossible now. The smallest I can go is 109 pix high.

To be clear: I don't need the small zone, but I can't make the big zone below it tall enough.

Scenario when this would be used?

For work. I'd be able to allign all my program's windows perfectly to the fancyzone.

Supporting information

No response

[crutkas]

What app? would love to understand this a bit more. Screenshots could be helpful too. /needinfo

[ghost]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has been marked as requiring author feedback but has not had any activity for 5 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 5 days of this comment.

[JunoGregoire]

What app? would love to understand this a bit more. Screenshots could be helpful too. /needinfo

It's called Bouwsoft. See screenshot linked below. The main window is the one with the orange bar at the top with "mijn werking, Relaties,..." All other functions in this software are new windows which open on top. I want to make a layout that has a separate zone for the windows to go in. The top of the screen to the bottom of the orange bar is 72 pixels, too small for a FancyZone.

EDIT: just after posting this I realised I could do this with a Canvas. I guess that solved it. Apologies!

[the3asic]

Kinda wanna bring this back because I'm using MiniMeters recently, and I want to use it as 64px tall, but the smallest zone that FancyZones is 109px. I'm using SnapIt for the small zone now but the functionality is not as good as FancyZones imo. Here are the screenshots. This is the ideal zone setup. This is the editor of SnapIt. This is the editor of FancyZones, which you can see, the top zone height is capped at 109px.

[hazyhorse]

You can make them smaller. Not in a perfect way, but it did what I needed.

• Make the layout you want with the lowest possible zone
• Add the layout to a vertical screen (or temporary changing screen to vertical should work too)
• Make zone smaller
• Change back to normal layout

It slightly messed up the exact sizes of all boxes, but I was able to change those back. Just make sure not to change the height of the 'cheated' zone (width could be fine but I didn't try).

[haakemon]

What is the reason there needs to be a min height restriction? Allowing smaller zones would also make it possible to create a workaround for the annoying bug that several users (myself included) see where the zones extend below the start menu, thus the bottom parts of the windows are not visible.

By allowing smaller zones, we could work around this issue by creating a small zone that covers the entire start menu until a proper fix is in place.

[crutkas]

@haakemon the horizontal thumb control in the editor is one of the reasons

[haakemon]

Ok, but is it possible to make the min height smaller? Now it seems to be about 108px. The start menu is 48px. Would it be possible to have a min height of 48 instead?

[Glurak006]

I discovered a workaround. You can configure smaller fancy zones by editing the config file directly. It is located under USERFOLDER\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\PowerToys\FancyZones\custom-layouts.json. There you can edit the rows-percentage or the columns-percentage values directly. To get it working you might need to reopen the layout in the editor. You don't get the nice visual indicator while editing and have to trial-and-error your way to the right value but it works for me.

[Heyian]

I discovered a workaround. You can configure smaller fancy zones by editing the config file directly. It is located under USERFOLDER\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\PowerToys\FancyZones\custom-layouts.json. There you can edit the rows-percentage or the columns-percentage values directly. To get it working you might need to reopen the layout in the editor. You don't get the nice visual indicator while editing and have to trial-and-error your way to the right value but it works for me.

Thanks for the tip, this has solved my issue! For anyone who's reading this, just make sure your numbers add up to 10000 otherwise you'll get an error, like I did ;)