UWPSpy
Introducing UWPSpy, an inspection tool for UWP and WinUI 3 applications that enables to view and manipulate UI elements and their properties in real time.
I’ve been interested in UWP since the release of Windows 11, where the taskbar UI was reimplemented using a new technology called XAML Islands. I created UWPSpy after gaining some experience with UWP. UWPSpy makes it easy to experiment with UWP UI elements and see how various changes behave before making them permanent. One example where UWPSpy comes in handy is with the Windows 11 Taskbar Styler mod, refer to its details page to see examples of UI customizations that are possible.
Download
UWPSpy.zip (418.15 kB)
Usage
- Run UWPSpy.exe and select the UWP/WinUI 3 application you want to spy on.
- A window with the application’s UI elements will appear for each UI thread of the target application.
- A UWPSpy spying window can be closed, in which case it will become hidden. It can be shown again by running UWPSpy.exe again and selecting the same application.
- To completely stop spying on an application, its process must be terminated.
Source code
https://github.com/m417z/UWPSpy
This is amazing! Features I’d like to see are..
Restore to default, Backups
Undo, redo
Color picker
Dark mode
Please tell me how to find the property responsible for the spacing between icons in the tray.
The spacing is controlled by two parameters:
MinWidthof theNotifyIconViewelement, set to32on my computer.Paddingof the grid child element marked on the screenshot, set to4on my computer.The
MinWidthvalue can be configured by the Windows 11 Taskbar Styler mod as can be seen on the screenshot. The grid element isn’t accessible by a name or an indicative type, so customizing its padding by the mod will require more effort. Still, with justMinWidththe width can be reduced from32to24, and set to any value above24.Thanks. MinWidth works. What kind of effort is required for padding?
You can use the following:
Target:
systemtray:ImageIconContent > GridStyle:
Padding=0Thanks again. Could you tell me an algorithm for finding such things via UWPSpy. I would like to try to reduce the spacing of the left group of buttons (start menu…).
You can watch the demo video at the top of this page to get some inspiration.