Taskbar Labels for Windows 11 v1.3: Combining modes, per-program label settings
The Taskbar Labels for Windows 11 mod was just updated to version 1.3, bringing two commonly requested options.
Combining modes
The Taskbar Labels for Windows 11 mod was published more than two years ago, when Windows 11 didn’t have labels out of the box. Eventually, Windows added labels, but like in previous Windows versions, you can only select between 2 modes:
- Show labels, don’t combine taskbar buttons
- Hide labels, combine taskbar buttons
The labels configuration is coupled to combining, and the two can’t be customized independently.
The new version of the mod changes that by providing the full range of options, allowing to select one of the four modes, as can be seen on the screenshot above:
- Show labels, don’t combine taskbar buttons
- Hide labels, combine taskbar buttons
- Show labels, combine taskbar buttons
- Hide labels, don’t combine taskbar buttons
Per-program label settings
Another common request was to configure labels per-program. Version 1.3 of the mod allows to select programs for which labels should be shown or hidden, depending on the selected mode.
This is a very welcome addition to an already amazing tool, thanks a lot. I’m using “Show labels, combine taskbar buttons” and my taskbar is so much calmer and less crowded 🙂
Though I wish I could also exclude programs from showing labels in this mode, but the help text says that the exclusions are ignored. Fortunately I was able to make this work for pinned programs, though it seems more like a bug. Could you turn this into a feature please? All this was possible in 7+ Taskbar Tweaker ❤️
https://i.imgur.com/xFrL9fI.png
To have the labels collapsed for specific pinned programs, you have to:
1. Disable mod
2. Open and close the program
3. Enable mod
To restore the labels, just restart the mod while the program is running.
At first I thought the exclusion list was working, but the above works for any pinned program, irregardless of the list.
Cheers!
Hi, thanks for the feedback. What you discovered is not the intended behavior, and the settings have a note:
That’s what happens. When you disable/enable the mod and do some operations in between, some assumptions are violated and weird stuff can happen.
Having it as a feature is not trivial, there’s a reason why the lists are ignored in the two last modes – they’re tailored to work the way they are, and adding per-program labels for them requires additional work. Maybe I’ll revisit it in one of the future versions.
That’s true that all this was possible in 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, but it operated on the old taskbar, the Windows 11 taskbar is completely different, and so customizing it requires a different approach.
Hey, thanks for the reply and all the work you’re doing, I understand that you had to rewrite everything from 7+ Taskbar Tweaker and that’s no small feat.
Should I make a post on the GitHub discussions about the desired grouping behavior so that it doesn’t get forgotten? 🙂
Sure, go ahead and create an issue (not a discussion).