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microsoft / PowerToys

Windows system utilities to maximize productivity
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Pinch-To-Zoom gesture on Desktop (or External Keyboard/Mouse setups) #29283

Open skrewde opened 1 year ago

skrewde commented 1 year ago

Description of the new feature / enhancement

According to Computer Hope, Pinch-to-zoom is defined as:

the multi-touch gesture that zooms in or out of the displayed content on a device with a touch screen. To use pinch-to-zoom, touch two fingers on the touch screen, and move them apart to zoom in, or together to zoom out.

Essentially, this feature replicates the Pinch-to-zoom gesture on non-touch Windows devices (setups with external keyboards and mice).

Scenario when this would be used?

This tool could be useful in many scenarios, especially for users with small displays. My setup is a 14-inch laptop to which I connect an external keyboard and mouse. When I sit to do serious work (especially in-browser), some sites/programs have content that is hard to read. This is partly due to bad eyesight (a sign of old age :sweat_smile:), but also my display size and its proximity (or lack thereof) to my eyes.

Scenarios: Scanning documentation, reading an article, examining an image or artefact, reading PDFs et cetera.

Considerations: Zoom shortcuts (CTRL+ + or CTRL+ -) do not solve this issue (Zoom doesn't work for images, video, or text on "heavily styled" websites). The magnification tool is great, but fiddly in practice, and unsuitable for power user workflows. Opening images in a new tab and zooming there/Downloading images to zoom in a photo viewer breaks most workflows.

In the cases I mentioned above, I find users miss the Pinch-to-zoom gesture that trackpads afford. This tool would help immensely as a quick way of scanning information either in-browser (as is the case for the most popular use-case for this gesture) or system-wide (as a "Magnifier shortcut" of sorts).

Supporting information

  1. A nice tool called Mouse Pinch-To-Zoom with 6,000+ users shows demand.
  2. Post on Superuser (StackExchange).
  3. Search for similar posts on Superuser (StackExchange).
  4. Post on Windows 10 Reddit.
  5. MDN Web API documentation - Pinch zoom gestures. Honestly not sure if this belongs but I added it just in case.
guojinhuei commented 8 months ago

非常期待这样的功能。

ScottBoyce commented 6 months ago

This would be a huge plus for Windows 10/11. I love that feature and often have to reach over to my laptop touch pad to pinch-zoom websites, even though it's connected to a dock with external monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

I think this issue might be from regular zoom causing the program to reflow the text and images rather than magnifying what is being viewed.

What might be a good option is let the use specify the hot key. That way, ctrl-wheel still does regular zoom, but then something like win-wheel or ctrl-alt-wheel does the pinch zoom that magnifies the application that the mouse pointer is hovering over. Also pressing these hot keys followed by a left click could serve as a method of moving the magnified application around to view different zoomed areas. (the mouse equivalent is doing a pinch zoom, then moving two fingers to move within the zoomed area).

This should also not be tied to just laptops but a feature in Windows, so that it can be used in desktops as well.