All my zones were resized.

[pressRtowin]

Microsoft PowerToys version

0.60.0

Running as admin

• Yes

Area(s) with issue?

FancyZones Editor

Steps to reproduce

I have no clue what happened. My computer shut down due to a power outage, and when I turned it back on, I opened powertoys to find that every single one of my 256x144 zones had been resized (and some slightly moved) to 250x144. I checked the json file as well, and sure enough, every single zone has been resized there. All I know for sure is that windows installed updates during the reboot. I'm unsure if I had installed a powertoys update at some point prior to that reboot, as my system had been on for a long time. Not the first time I've encountered a bug like this (where zone settings were changed (or sometimes erased entirely) when rebooting. Not sure why that file is being modified so much when the editor is not explicitly opened and the user isn't issuing save commands from there.

✔️ Expected Behavior

No response

❌ Actual Behavior

No response

Other Software

No response

[Caleb-D]

I have experienced something similar on my computer as well (without a power failure). Do you have the option enabled to treat all your screens as one screen (so you can make zones that span screens)?

I have two 4k screens rotated to portrait mode and one laptop screen, all active. The laptop screen is to the bottom right of the two 4k screens. I have tried with all at 150% scaling. Usually I prefer the two 4k screens at 150% scaling and the laptop screen at 125% scaling.

But I can't get FancyZones to be useful on my PC because of the tendency for zones to resize themselves.

[pressRtowin]

I don't think I've ever used that option. and I don't use any display scaling either. This issue doesn't happen frequently, but often enough that it's annoying with how many zones I have to resize. I'm just confused as to why the file is even being changed in the first place, if a user isn't explicitly saving a layout. I feel like not doing that would resolve the majority of the issues I've had with zones.

[SeraphimaZykova]

Hi, can you please attach a /bugreport so I can see more details?

[ghost]

Hi there!

We need a bit more information to really debug this issue. Can you add a "Report Bug" zip file here? You right click on our system tray icon and just go to report bug. Then drag the zipfile from your desktop onto the GitHub comment box in this issue. Thanks!

[SeraphimaZykova]

Ref: #19423

[pressRtowin]

Working on that file, but in the meantime I'll note that unlike that report:

• not on secondary screen
• not in portrait (however, I do have a secondary display in portrait mode. However that was set up with the other type of zones that use dividers, not custom sized zones, and it remained unaffected)
• not a persistent issue that occurs whenever I save and exit the editor. I can't even say for sure that every time I encountered a similar issue it's been due to the same cause (it's happened like 4 times in the last 2 years maybe?). From what I remember, it's usually after some update or something else that involves shutting down my system. Sometimes I've logged in and found that the custom layouts json (zone settings as it was back then) was deleted entirely. This time, every 256 was edited to 250, and every column of zones was moved the same number of pixels (per column) left or right. They were almost all moved left by 1-6 pixels I think, except the first column of zones which were moved to the right like 4 pixels or so (don't really remember as I went to bed immediately after fixing all my zones last night)

[pressRtowin]

Here's the bug report

PowerToysReport_2022-08-03-16-09-34.zip

[SeraphimaZykova]

Thank you for the report.
Can you please clarify one more question? After you updated zones, did the issue occur again?
I'm asking because one of the previous bugs affected canvas layouts if they had incorrect ref-width and ref-height. After editing layout once they will be set to correct values and the issue won't happen again.
/needinfo

[pressRtowin]

You mean after I fixed them? No it did not. However, my ref-width and ref-height have been set to the same (correct) values since before it was changed from zone-settings.json to custom-layouts.json (quite some time).

[SeraphimaZykova]

Checked the saved zone-settings.json in the report, it has the same width and height values, seems like my guess was wrong.
Could be the same issue as #19423

[pressRtowin]

Well, as I said previously, there are some big differences between what I experienced, and the details in that report. For one, that report says it only happens on their secondary monitor, and only when it's set to portrait, and while I do have a secondary monitor set to portrait, it only affected the zones on my primary monitor, which is not set to portrait.

Still it seems like all these issues, and whatever other issues I encountered in the past that resulted in the custom-layouts/zone-settings file being deleted altogether, would be resolved if custom-layouts.json simply wasn't altered, manipulated, or otherwise messed around with unless a user is explicitly making changes and saving them from the editor. It seems odd that any routine exists whatsoever that--without any prompt to the user--changes every instance of "256" to "250" (among other changes) in that file.

[SeraphimaZykova]

that report says it only happens on their secondary monitor, and only when it's set to portrait, and while I do have a secondary monitor set to portrait, it only affected the zones on my primary monitor, which is not set to portrait.

Those things aren't make difference for FZ, the key things are monitor id and work area size.
So I'm going to close this issue as a duplicate to centralize discussion in one thread. Thank you.

/dup of #19423

[ghost]

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!