microsoft
FancyZones keeps changing zone sizes on startup
Microsoft PowerToys version
0.64.1
Installation method
GitHub
Running as admin
No
Area(s) with issue?
FancyZones
Steps to reproduce
There are no actual steps to reproduce this. It happens randomly on startup. FancyZones either keeps the set zone sizes, or shrinks them, or enlarges them for no apparent reason.
The shrinking/enlargement does, however, always happen by a certain amount of pixels. A 640 wide zone becomes either 593 wide (-47) or 690 wide (+50).
✔️ Expected Behavior
I was expecting to keep the sizes I set, simple.
❌ Actual Behavior
As described above, FancyZones changes zone sizes for no apparent reason.
Other Software
It is possible that my Linkbar64 is somehow affecting FancyZones' functionality, although that wouldn't really explain the randomness.
Hi @getphobo. Is your taskbar (or Linkbar) vertical? I assume that because you say about width changes, and the width of zones depends on the work area's width. /needinfo
Yes, both bars are vertical: Linkbar64 on the left, Windows taskbar on the right (using ExplorerPatcher for Windows 11). Each bar is 260px wide in my configuration, and I'm using a 16:9 4K2K screen with 250% scaling.
I've designed my FancyZones to display one large rectangle filling the whole area between the sidebars, i.e., it fills an area of 3320x2160 pixels. Within the app, this is translated into 1328x864 pixels due to the scaling. Additionally, there are four corner rectangles each 1600x1025 pixels large (shown as 640x410 in app).
There are 120 horizontal and 110 vertical pixels of space between these four corner rectangles that is needed to activate the single large rectangle (similar to maximizing, but it remains a 'normal' window).
So, after some extended time using FancyZones across multiple PCs, I can say with certainty that the issue described here must be partly related to either Windows' Explorer or DWM because I also see other apps failing to respect the linkbar and the taskbar whenever FancyZones fails to do that.
They then stretch from the left to the right screen border disregarding both the linkbar and taskbar, so linkbar and taskbar overlap the app window. Essentially, the same happens to FancyZones. It's as if some sort of prioritization fails, so the Windows desktop becomes the limiting instance instead of the linkbar to the left and the Explorer taskbar to the right.
In order to fix this for FancyZones, I think, the automatic size adjustment would have to be made optional so that FancyZones could keep its set size even if that desktop bug would occur again.
In other words, instead of looking for a fix for a bug that is not an inherent FancyZones bug, better look for a way to stop FancyZones from auto-adjusting its size in disregard of what the user set it to.
I hope that helps.