I guess if I'm showing it, I need to adjust my screen resolution. 1920 by 1080. What is it? 1920 by 1200 or 1080? Hence 1080p. That's what that stands for? What I want to talk about, Mark... Well, what about the 1920 part? 16 by 9. I know. Because it's 1080 progressive. It's 1080 scan lines progressive. Like 720p when HD came out and everything was decided and we said, hey, it's HD television. High definition, 720p, 720 progressive scan lines.
as an upgrade from 480i, which was 480 interlaced scanlines. I've got a really, really cool device called a RetroTink, which is a kind of a FPGA upscaler. So you send it like Super Nintendo or Genesis, kind of like crappy video. It's like 320 by 240, and it's like an NTSC or a PAL signal, and it will upscale it.
improve it, and then apply a filter for it, and then make it look on a 4K display like it used to look when you were looking at it on a CRT. And it does it with two milliseconds or one millisecond of latency. Bye. Hey friends, it's Mark and Scott learn stuff. And Mark is currently learning stuff. Mark is currently sharing his screen and learning all how to have a clean desktop. We're going to talk about Zoom It.
Would you say that this is the tool that you are most well-known for amongst all the SysInternals tools? Why has ZoomIt captured the imagination of the public? I don't know if it's the best tool. I don't guess this or Process Explorer. Yeah. But I wrote this tool for myself as I was giving technical talks. I wrote it because with Dave Solomon, we do demos of SysInternals tools and other tools showing Windows internals. And we wanted to be able to zoom. And there was a...
Toshiba laptop utility that came with the Toshiba laptop that would let you do that but it was clunky and missed a lot of the features that we wanted and so one day I was just like oh just let me write my own that has the nice features and functionality that we we'd love to see and out pop zoom it and it's been evolving now for it's probably 20 years no more than 20 25 years yeah it's probably that old
If you go and find our talk, we did a talk on ZoomIt, I think, in 2022? Yeah, 2022. And we discovered that ZoomIt is one... C file. It's not quite one C file. It's mostly one C file. It's actually one function that's called do it. 5,000 lines of C. No, but it's not exactly factored into like... Here it is. Here's the main file. It's not... So, I'm sorry, 7,000 lines. Yeah, but it's got some other files too. It's fair. Yeah, that's new. Video recording is a new feature. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think you get to say it's not a 7,000 line file when you go, but it's also this 209 utility function. You said it was 5,000. So, yeah. It's a lot. I like to correct you whenever I can. I know you do as much as possible. I... would go so far as to say it's probably the first thing that I install. I'm not just blowing smoke to say that, because I've realized after 15, 20 years of using ZoomIt, since day one, it's in my fingers. Like, it's in my muscle memory.
I have my mouse in my right hand and I have my fingers. This is the zoom it claw. Control one, control one in my hands. And is it stuck in your hands as well? It is. I zoom almost every day. Because there'll be something on my screen that is just too, the font, you can't resize it and I need to see it. So I'll zoom. And this is worth noting because he's not joking. He's not saying he zooms every day while giving talks.
He's saying he zooms every day just randomly. I'll zoom. It's just a part of the operating system for me. So there are times when, yes, I know I can go control plus to zoom in on something in Outlook, but I'll just zoom it and frame it and crop it just to have it in front of me.
in order to in order to see just to concentrate so zooming is very natural in my it's in my hands all the time i'm zooming when i'm by myself now there is the windows magnifier you can draw by yourself too yeah i do why don't you just use windows magnifier
Because it's... With all due respect to the lovely people who worked on Windows Magnifier. It just doesn't have the... So, first of all, it leaves a little magnifier toolbar floating on your screen. Right. It doesn't have all the annotation features, the colors, that are all keystroke-driven.
Like there's no going through the mouse, go up to the menu and click it. It's just all driven with keystrokes, which makes it completely transparent. Right. Windows Magnifier is primarily an accessibility tool. for those with low vision, and it is great, but it's effectively the live Zoom feature of ZoomIt is what Windows Magnifier offers. This is more of a John Madden draws on his screen utility, which is why I think it has a lot of value.
So you want to talk about what it's got, what it can do? Yeah. The question is, which of the two ZoomIt experts Zooms better? Who should be allowed to do it? You know what? We should have a Zoom-off. A Zoom-off, we do, because the student has become the teacher. All right, let's see your zoom-it skills. Well, okay, so first thing, you see these tabs. This kind of breaks down the features that it's got in it. So basic zoom. Let's just take a look at basic zoom.
Let me pull up Process Explorer so we can just demo on this. Okay. Control 1 to zoom in. Now, you note that it froze when he did that. So, boom. Now, you've taken a screenshot and zoomed in on the thing. Yeah. And then you can do... Control up arrow or control mouse wheel to zoom really in, which I like to do. Then there's draw, which goes hand in hand. This is the kind of two most basic features. So zoom in, press the mouse left.
And then you get this drawing cursor, and then you can draw and annotate. And then you can do shapes. This is Control-Shift with dragging the line. Just Shift is... an underline. Control Z to undo. Underline. Control for a box. Tab for a circle. And then you can change colors, like I want green. So green box. Y for yellow. So there's a bunch of colors. You can do blur. You can do highlighting. So shift Y and let's make the cursor bigger. I'm using control plus mouse wheel.
And then I can do highlighting. And if I can change the color to green highlight. You're changing opacity there with control shift mouse wheel. And then there's X for blurring. And then there's degrees of blur you can control. So that's drawing. And then there's typing, T. You're typing in blur right now? Yeah, I didn't want to type in blur. R, let me do...
R for red, go to typing, and then control wheel to select the size of the typing and just click where you want to type and say, hello, Scott. Are you doing this with a mouse or with a test pad? Mouse. Okay. I'm just trying to think about how I'm going to defeat you in the zoom off because you're moving positively geriatric. Thanks. Wow. And then you can...
Control 2 for just freezing the screen without zooming, because if you want to do annotation at full res, you can do that. So that's the zooming and typing and drawing. And then there's live zoom. which is I want to show you some details without freezing it. And then the exciting new feature, Control-Shift. Live zoom. Control shift two. Control shift four is live zoom. Control shift four. And here I'm annotating a live screen. Like take a look at that working set.
I like that you panned and it panned with you because it's sitting on the same transparent surface on the top of it. It is. So watch that. It's in front in the Z order, but it's not going to come along with it. So all of the drawing things work.
Naturally, but just with live zoom. So that's the feature that I've had in mind for probably 15 years. How would you draw on the screen and then take a screenshot of the annotation? If I had found a bug in Process Explorer, how do I draw on the screen and then send it to you? So screenshots. So here, let me, well, just zoom, draw, and then control six. Takes a screenshot, puts it in the clipboard too, so you can control V at some place.
Or you could do, if you knew you wanted to save it to file, you could shortcut that by doing Control-Shift-6. Grab this part of the screen. And we're not actually seeing that because of the limitations of some of the screen capture. So what you saw there was a ghosted moment there where it faded out the screen and then he cropped what he wanted. So Control-6 put it into screenshot snipping view. Yeah.
So that's the way you can get a screenshot. Now, there's a ton more. There's demo type, and I'll let you demo that. There's break timers, because if you're giving a talk. Yeah. You might want to have a time out. I used to use break timer at development or when I was teaching classes. And then you can do like, oops, I need another few minutes. Also, sometimes I want to make the screen go away and just draw on a whiteboard.
Ah-ha. Control one or control two to zoom. And then K for black. And then now you're Khan Academy. Yeah, W for white. Isn't it funny when you go and you give an exquisitely technical talk and it's the deepest, most intense content that you have and they're like, how did you draw on the screen? I see that all the time. Every talk for the last two decades.
Now, finally, one more thing to show, and that's recording. You can screen record too. So all the zooming and everything that I've been doing, you can capture easily with... Screen recording. So I just did a control of five. And now I'm going to zoom. And I'm going to draw. And then when I'm done, I just say control five again. And I get prompted to save the recording. I'm going to just save it to the desktop.
How long could that recording be? As long as internal memory? Yeah, and there's the recording I just took. I use this kind of stuff for doing bugs and stuff a lot. Yeah, so that's a look at the tool.
Before we get into the more advanced tools, I want to show you how I use it. Yeah, let's see. All right. Okay, let's see your zooming skills. Okay. So here's Visual Studio Code. When there's a thing called katas, like if you're... doing a code kata or you know you're doing a martial art it's this thing where you like you know do a repeated movement multiple times in taekwondo it's called a hyung and it's
fundamental stuff that you do as many times as possible. Because the theory is you don't fear the person with a million kinds of punches. You fear the person that has one punch that they've practiced a million times. I have this, when I said I have it in my hands, the muscle memory of like, I want you to see this, and I point to it and I say, you know, look here, is so fundamental. It's in me.
And being able to go and talk about that stuff quickly requires thought and requires effort, right? So... What I'm encouraging people to do when they think about becoming a competent ZoomIt person, it's the difference between this. I'll give an example. Here's the before. So we're going to take a look here at OnGetAsync. And hang on, hang on, hang on. Okay. And that is, that's right here. Hang on a second. That's there. Right? That's fine, but...
it's clear that you're tripping on your feet. And it's like, all right, let's talk about OnGetAsync. What's going on here, right? That simple fluency of like, what's the deal with OnGetAsync? Let's talk about this. Why is this important? Well, because it's asynchronous. I'm talking, I'm moving, and I'm drawing all at the same time. So it's a fluency or a fluidity. And in my mind, I'm going control one, adjust, click, alt, control, drag, and then pull away.
So then the result is, you know, the result is, you know, and that is practice. I think I could do it as good as that. I'd love to see it. I'd love to see it. Impress me. What, you're challenging me to do it? Oh, we're having to zoom off. I just think that the point I'm making is that when someone's like, oh, I wish I could do what you, practice. Oh, you're so good. Practice. But no one thinks there's practice there. You got to hit.
the you got to hit the tree hard enough as many times as possible your nickel until your knuckles hurt and do that for years all right so your bread and butter moves in zoom at your katas are box and arrow and some typing Exactly. And you do change color. You know how to change colors, too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I assume whiteboard, blackboard. Yep. That's a great point. So I like that bread and butter. So white belt, white belt, zoom in.
click, white belt, right? Yellow belt, box and arrow. Now, another one would be box and multicolored arrows at speed, right? And then maybe we're like a purple belt. As you're getting towards would be something like, you know, typing while you're talking. And then another one would be dropping. You could add a little bit of power toys if you want to do a little spotlight action there. That's another competitive product. But then going in here and then doing.
We'll get to that in a minute. Oh, okay. And another one would be what I call the Sal Khan from Khan Academy, which is the just drawing on your screen. And then black belt is when you're thinking about aero size. Yeah. And doing stuff like that. I just made those belts up. And then, yeah, yeah. And those are the basics. That's the basic fluency with ZoomIt. I think then live Zoom, you just admitted that you're...
Still not practiced on it. Oh. So live zoom, here's a great example, right? So if you're over here in the corner, you can notice my VS Code pets. This does not capture the VS Code pet in all of its glory because it's not moving. So this is a great opportunity to live Zoom. And now we see our VS Code pet. Now try live drawing. Oh, you're not. Fail. Yeah, actually, I don't have that build. I have Zoom at 8.
But yeah, Shift F4, right? Shift Control F4? Just Shift 4. Shift 4. Nope. Yeah, I don't have that build. Well, that's also a fail. That's embarrassing. That is also a fail. Not preparing for this technical talk is a fail. Yeah. So that would be one. being aware of that. The other one is not making people nauseous. Nobody likes this. So one of the tricks, one of the unspoken tricks is that point at a thing and hit control one and you will zoom in.
on the thing you pointed at. Yep. Instead of zooming and then hunting for the thing. Yeah. You point at it and it goes there. That's a great tip. And there it is. That's a good tip. Demotype, which... I made with other people's contributions just for you. Yeah. And I need to use it more. And you've never used it, I think. I've never used it. So this is the funny thing, right? So you make things because they're awesome. And demo type.
came from the inspiration of a thing called Hacker Typer. And Hacker Typer is this great joke at HackerTyper.com where you just start typing. So I'm just going to write some code. See how it tries to... So I'm just typing. So you can see I'm writing code at speed, right? And as I type, it's dumping out blocks of code to make you feel like you're a super hacker. So then if you were making a movie, you could go...
So I called Mark and friends and said, wouldn't it be cool if I could write some sample code in a text file? So we could go over here, grab this block of code right here, open up Notepad and stick it in a folder somewhere, stick it on the desktop. and say Hanselman demo.txt. So now that's in a file called Hanselman demo.txt. And then you can't zoom it on ZoomIt while ZoomIt's open, which is one of the great failures of ZoomIt because I want to zoom in on this.
I didn't want to zoom it. It's too meta. Too meta. I don't know what would happen. The universe might collapse on itself. The universe would explode, indeed. So let's go and say Hanselman Demo, and then I'll say OK. I'll open up a new folder here, and we'll say Control-7, and it's typing the sample code. Did you put it in manual drive mode? So this is in automatic drive. Yeah, so you can put it in manual where it does the accurate mode. Let's switch out of here.
And what's cool is I just hit Escape, and it works. So we'll go back over into ZoomIt, and I'm going to just go find it in the tray, right-click over here, go back to Demo Type, and then we'll say Drive Input with Typing. This is the genius of it. So as I'm typing random chunks of different sizes, so like one, I just pressed one button and two keystrokes happened. So then if I go type, type, type, type, type, it's as if I'm a super amazing typer.
Isn't that cool, though? It's disappointing that you don't use it. Well, I need to use it because I need to get it back into my hands because Control-7 is just not quite there yet. Now, the other thing that's cool is that you can go and separate snippets with start and end. So you can say... Demo number one, start and end. Demo number two, start and end. And then it will not only drive that information automatically, but you can put in demos like enter and up and down and right. So you could...
simulate you typing and invoking IntelliSense and then down arrowing through the list of IntelliSense and then pressing enter. So it's not quite hot auto hotkey, but since you're already using ZoomIt. To do your presentations, it's the perfect thing to add on. All right. Next time, I expect to see you really know how to use that. And actually, in South Africa, which you just got back from.
I think you used it there, didn't you? Yes. Given that I'm on the plane in two days, but I'm back now because this is being published late, it was amazing. Made the keynote that much better. That's what I figured. Especially now that you practice now. Now that I practice. Yeah. But you got to practice. Like people got to spend time with these things.
It's super, super helpful. And then also the recording. I want to hit the recording again because you can record even, you can zoom in and record just the zoomed in part of the screen. Yeah, you can do it. Just like with the snipping, you can snip the whole screen or you can snip a subset of the screen.
snip part of the screen and just record that section of the screen. All right. Now, one last thing. You mentioned PowerToys and you showed it, and I also have the mouse highlight to show you where you are. Zoom, it's already in PowerToys. Let me say that.
It's out. It's in PowerToys now. What? Yeah. That's great. So you partnered up with two PowerToys, and now you are a PowerToys. I'm a PowerToy and a Sysinternals tool. It's available external of PowerToys, but now when you get PowerToys, you get Zoomit as part of it, and it's open source now. I've been showing you source code in the sysinternals repo. Now it's in GitHub. Now I do not have to. Now if somebody wants to go refactor it to break the 7,000-line monolith, we'll consider the PR.
So it's open source. I can see the source code or zoom it and then zoom in and talk about it. It's a great tool, and I show it to non-technical people as well. This is not for programmers. If you're a teacher, if you're an educator, it's fantastic. I've got so many people that are using it instead of a magnifier that have eyesight impairment. You've got to go.
But this was a joy. Thank you for your time. And thank you always to our friends who enjoy the show. Thank you to our producer. And please like and subscribe and share as much of this as you possibly can, because if more people watch it, then we'll be able to justify. Well, I'll be able to justify to my boss why I'm doing it. And then Mark will continue to show up. And I'll be able to justify it to myself. Yeah, you'll justify it to yourself. Cool. Like and subscribe and we'll see you next week.