FancyZones: Please pretty please improve the shortcuts for zone layout change

[chjohans]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

The current shortcut keys for activating a zone layout are quite horrible as it is impossible for anyone, except for the fraction of us with really huge hands and extremely long fingers, and the very few with miniature keyboards, to change the active zone layout with one hand. Currently, you have to press 4 keys at the same time to activate a different layout template, this is really difficult to do with one hand. And letting go of the mouse to help with this shortcut does not exactly enhance productivity. This really should be changed to something more user-friendly. I propose the following:

1. That the CTRL-ALT-WIN combination can be configured to something else by the user. WIN+1 or even CTRL+WIN+1 can quite easily be pressed with one hand.

2. Allow the mouse wheel to be used to switch between zone layouts that are assigned to a hotkey. This will limit the possible zone layouts to 10, it should be reasonably fast to scroll through 10 zone layouts. This function should scroll up or down through the zone layouts starting from the currently active zone, and up or down from there based on the direction the mouse wheel is moved. Use the number each zone layout is assigned to as the index for scrolling through the zone layouts (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0), but skip indices that have no zone layout, and when you reach 0 go back to 1 or the first index that has a zone layout.

To prevent interference with other applications that might be using the mouse wheel this function should only be active when a configurable keyboard shortcut is being pressed. Or alternatively, and possibly even better, only when a zone is active, eg when SHIFT is being pressed or a non-primary mouse button is being pressed while dragging a window. That was another keyboard shortcut for this can be avoided.

3. It would be really great if you also could visualize all the zone layouts that are assigned to hotkey in a similar way that the W11 DWM does.

Scenario when this would be used?

I am confident that this change would greatly improve the user experience and increase productivity when working with multiple zones.

As a Windows 11 user, I am of course aware that the W11 DWM has the functionality to show multiple zone layouts and let me drag a window to a specific zone in a specific zone layout. This is however useless to me when I am not given the option to customize the zone layouts.

Supporting information

For my computers that are running Windows 11, I could probably do without FancyZones if there was an editor that would let me customize the default zones that are defined by DWM in Windows 11.

[AureliusPatiens]

I've been using the same layout, so I don't have your problem for a while, but I support your statement

[shodanx2]

I propose, while dragging a screen and then activating the zones with right click or shift.
That then scroll up or down or pressing tab/ctrl+tab should cycle through the available zone layouts in the screen in which the cursor is at that moment.

[gazpachoking]

In the mean time you can use the 'Keyboard Manager' power toy to make a new shortcut that maps to the impossible one.

[nguyen-dows]

/dup #24995

[microsoft-github-policy-service]

Hi! We've identified this issue as a duplicate of another one that already exists on this Issue Tracker. This specific instance is being closed in favor of tracking the concern over on the referenced thread. Thanks for your report!