- The developers of PowerToys are currently working on a new feature for the software, which enables users to easily measure the distances as pixels.
- The new feature is dubbed Screen Ruler and it is likely to be very useful for any kind of designer or web developer.
- The release date of the new feature is not available yet since there are still some bugs to be fixed before the shipment.
PowerToys, one of the most successful tools that deliver additional, super-focused features to the Windows operating system will soon have a new feature for measuring the pixels on the screen. PowerToys is an open-source project that is supported by Microsoft itself. It currently delivers many key features with shortcuts such as setting a specific window as always on top, reading the color code of the pixel your mouse cursor is hovering on, specifically defining the areas of the screen to snap your windows, and many more.
Screen Ruler to measure the elements
Finding out the exact size of the elements on the screen is often required for the designers and generally, it takes an unnecessary amount of steps while measuring. PowerToys’ upcoming Screen Ruler component aims to reduce those steps to one. As the GIF below shows, the tool has four ways to measure the things on the screen.
The first one is a simple rectangle tool; you select an area and see its height and width pixel values, just like I have personally used Lightshot, a screenshot tool, for the same purpose when I needed to measure.
The second tool is the most interesting and innovative one as it automatically detects the objects on the screen and measures the distance between them, both vertically and horizontally. It looks like it is also capable of finding out those measures of an object when the user hovers the mouse cursor inside the object. The two remaining options do the same trick as the second one, but only at one angle: vertical or horizontal.
The Screen Ruler feature of PowerToys is under development, and you can see its current state on the GitHub page. There are still some things to be fixed and it is not clear when it will be ready. However, when it is ready, it might become one of the favorite tools for any kind of designer and web developer.