Option to revert to the legacy UI of PowerRename from v0.47.1

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Since v0.49.0, PowerRename UI has been overhauled to better fit the Windows 11 UI / UX.

Arguably, this looks a better UI design however from productivity perspective, the UWP look and feel does not fit very well if the tool being an essential daily driver. UI scaling is unstable, some options are less straight forward (e.g. lower / upper / capital case, which require :hover tooltip to understand), some require extra steps to produce the same output (e.g. dropdown vs. ticks previously).

As a result, few users from our group have attempted to adapt to the new UI, but all ended up have to rollback to v0.47, as the new UI is affecting how quickly the renaming operation can be done.

Hence it would be good to allow the legacy UI or version of Power Rename to be selectable (even if the legacy version is not being maintained anymore), while not necessarily for the user to lock themselves onto certain version to avoid receiving updates on other utilities.

Scenario when this would be used?

It worth note unlike other utility such as color picker or fancy zones, utility on batch file processing (e.g. Total Commander, Bulk Rename Utility) usually does not require a super fancy UWP-like UI, because it needs to do job fast and robust enough while offers a higher degree of versatility without the process to interpret what each icon represents. Icons :selected or not can be easily missed vs. some simple ticks, due to the fact that each file renaming scenario could be massively different.

Looking at commercial products like Bulk Rename Utility (BRU), its UI and UX have been super robust for many years, but it has 2 issues for relatively light-weight users:

It has to operate in full or large window in order to gain the full picture;
It has too many options designed for some very specific purpose, which many in everyday task are not necessary;

Based on the issues above, Power Rename has been a superb alternative to BRU whilst offers the minimum required options and a fast, widget-like experience, but the new UI are now holding the experience back to the point we have to choose between legacy Power Rename and BRU.

Supporting information

A similar UI / UX debate in the past year is regarding Adobe had set the default option of "Ctrl + Shift + S" to "Save a copy" from previously "Save as", which caused a wave of frustrations. Eventually this is solved by keeping the widely acceptable mechanism as a legacy option (e.g. https://taylorhieber.co/how-to-save-a-jpeg-in-photoshop-with-save-a-copy-or-legacy-save-as/).

Appreciate this is not a case-to-case example, but it demonstrates how simple new UI / UX tweaks could break the existing workflow and cause frustrations for people relying on it as productivity drivers. Hence like the Photoshop example, would be good if legacy Power Rename can be made into a selectable option.

microsoft / PowerToys