Control Deck for ZoomIt: drive Sysinternals ZoomIt from a Stream Deck

August 21, 2026

ZoomIt has 45 addressable keyboard shortcuts. Mid-presentation, you’ll remember four of them. Control Deck for ZoomIt is a free Stream Deck profile that puts the rest on physical keys: zoom, draw, pens, highlighters, the break timer, screen recording, snips, OCR, and scrolling panorama capture.

It’s a profile, not a plugin. That distinction turned out to be the whole design, so it’s worth explaining before anything else.

Submitted to the Elgato Marketplace. If you want automatic updates, wait for that release rather than installing the GitHub build by hand. The GitHub release works today, but you’ll have to re-import it yourself when a new version ships.

Why a profile beats a plugin here

ZoomIt exposes no API, no IPC, and no command-line trigger. Its entire control surface is global hotkeys plus single keystrokes while a mode is active. Stream Deck’s built-in Hotkey action already sends those, for keys and dials alike.

That built-in action is marked "PrivateAPI": true, so third-party plugins can’t call it, and the SDK has no keyboard API at all. A plugin would mean re-implementing keystroke injection in native code — FFI to SendInput or a helper executable — and shipping per-architecture binaries through review to do a worse job than the action Elgato already ships.

A plugin could add exactly two things a profile can’t: live state feedback and reading the user’s remapped hotkeys. ZoomIt exposes no state, and its defaults never touch disk, so neither is achievable. PowerToys writes to HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\ZoomIt only when a hotkey changes from its default, so a fresh install has one value: EulaAccepted.

What’s on the deck

Three pages on a 5×3 MK.2, 45 keys, 41 of ZoomIt’s 45 shortcuts.

Zoom, Draw, Break, LiveZoom, LiveDraw, DemoType, Record, and Panorama are toggles. A second press sends Esc, and the icon flips to show the mode is live.

Whiteboard is a Multi Action Switch: one press sends Ctrl+1 → K → Ctrl+W — zoom, black pen, blank to white. Ordering matters. Send K after Ctrl+W and drawing reverts the blank.

Four shortcuts are impossible from a Stream Deck at all: straight line, rectangle, ellipse, and arrow each need a modifier held through a mouse drag, and a key only sends press-release.

Three device layouts

The grid is parameterised in a device block, so a new variant is a config file rather than a code change. Model IDs and grid sizes came from Elgato’s own per-device defaults in Program Files\Elgato\StreamDeck\DefaultProfiles.

The Mini is deliberately minimal. Fitting the full set into six keys needs roughly nine folder pages, which is worse than useless mid-presentation, so it carries four desktop triggers, five pen colours, and five drawing tools.

Coordinates are validated against the declared grid, so a key that would land off the device fails the build instead of being silently dropped. One caution if you build your own variants: the shipped Stream Deck + default profile reports a 5×3 keypad, which contradicts the hardware. Treat 4×2 as correct.

The profile format rules nobody documents

These came from diffing against working profiles and reading logs\StreamDeck.log. Break any of them and you get a silent or misleading failure.

Folder pages aren’t listed in Pages at all. They’re reached only through a Create Folder action’s Settings.ProfileUUID.

Key encoding was reverse-engineered from real configured Hotkey actions: NativeCode always matches VKeyCode, QTKeyCode matches for letters and digits but uses ASCII for punctuation and the Qt 0x01000000 enum range for special keys, and KeyModifiers is a bitmask with Shift=1, Ctrl=2, Alt=4, Cmd=8. Unconfigured slots use VKeyCode: -1, QTKeyCode: 33554431, NativeCode: 146.

Multi Action compatibility constrains what one key press can do. Hotkey, Delay, and Switch Profile combine; Create Folder, Parent Folder, and Hotkey Switch don’t. That’s why no key can both send a hotkey and open a folder.

Import, don’t hand-install

Stream Deck keeps its profile index in a binary Devices blob under HKCU:\Software\Elgato Systems GmbH\StreamDeck. A folder copied into ProfilesV3 is never registered and is silently ignored. Import is the only reliable path, and the streamdeck://app/openfile/<url-encoded-path> deep link works more consistently than the Windows file association.

Two things cost real debugging time here:

• Never force-kill Stream Deck. After Stop-Process -Force, the next instance either wedges its import subsystem or exits outright. Imports then log import: with no import finished and hang forever, with no error.
• Imports hang transiently for no visible reason. No dialog, no error, nothing after the import: line. It isn’t the package. Wait a minute and import again — a retry on the same instance usually succeeds.

Stream Deck also flushes profile edits to disk lazily, roughly every 12 seconds, so reading a file back immediately after saving in the UI can show stale data.

ZoomIt’s published shortcuts are wrong in four places

Reading ZoomIt’s source in the PowerToys repository turned up four errors in the documented shortcut table:

Two shortcuts are missing from the table entirely: Ctrl+Shift+8 for panorama to file and Ctrl+9 for DemoMirror.

Whiteboard has undocumented conditions too. While the break timer runs, Ctrl+W and Ctrl+K change the timer background colour instead. Screen blanking is gated on being zoomed, and it’s blocked in LiveDraw for user-driven input.

Two things that will bite you

Toggles track their own state, not ZoomIt’s. Exit ZoomIt with the physical Esc key or a right-click and the toggle desyncs, so the next press sends the wrong command. Press twice to resync. ZoomIt exposes no state to query, so a plugin couldn’t fix this either.

Elevation has to match. If ZoomIt runs elevated, which PowerToys can be configured to do, but Stream Deck doesn’t, UIPI blocks injected input entirely. Run both at the same integrity level.

If the zoom-to-whiteboard transition feels slow, that’s ZoomIt’s telescoping animation, not the profile. Turn off Animate zoom in ZoomIt Options → Zoom.

Validation

Verified on 2026-08-18 against PowerToys ZoomIt v0.100.2 and Stream Deck 7.4.2:

Because ZoomIt’s overlay takes foreground and both processes run at the same integrity level, injected keystrokes reach it through the same SendInput path the built-in Hotkey action uses.

One testing note worth passing on: GDI CopyFromScreen doesn’t capture ZoomIt’s overlay, so pixel sampling can’t verify that a mode opened. Enumerate windows instead.

Icons

The 47 icons are generated from Fluent UI System Icons. Fluent SVGs hardcode fill="#212121", invisible against black keys, so the build recolours every glyph: recording actions red, pens and highlighters in their own ink colour, everything else white.

npm install
npm run build:icons       # -> dist/icons/*.png (144x144), dist/svg/*.svg
npm run contact-sheet     # -> dist/contact-sheet.png for visual QA

The build resolves the largest available source size, since Fluent redraws each size on its own grid and larger sources carry more detail, and prefers filled variants, which read better at key size. It fails loudly if a named icon doesn’t exist or has no recolorable fill.

Build it yourself

npm run build:profile            # MK.2 (5x3)
npm run build:profile:xl         # Stream Deck XL (8x4)
npm run build:profile:mini       # Stream Deck Mini (3x2)
npm run build:release:all        # every variant -> dist/release/*.streamDeckProfile

--release omits keys marked "machineSpecific": true, which is currently just the ZoomIt launcher key and its absolute path. Paths in configs use %LOCALAPPDATA%-style variables expanded at build time, so no username ever lands in source.

ZoomIt isn’t included or redistributed here — install it free from Sysinternals or as part of Microsoft PowerToys. This project isn’t affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.

Resources

• Control Deck for ZoomIt — layout configs, generator scripts, and icon build
• Releases — MK.2, XL, and Mini profiles
• ZoomIt on Sysinternals
• Microsoft PowerToys
• Fluent UI System Icons