Windhawk mods for the Windows 11 taskbar
A few weeks ago, Windhawk, the customization marketplace for Windows programs, was released. You can read the announcement blog post for more details and for the motivation behind creating it. One of the sections of the blog post was dedicated to 7+ Taskbar Tweaker.
Regarding the future of 7+ Taskbar Tweaker: It will keep existing as a separate program which supports Windows 7 to Windows 10. As mentioned in a recent blog post, most parts of the taskbar were reimplemented in Windows 11, and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker can’t be made to work with the new taskbar without a huge amount of work. My plan, at least in the short term, is to implement the most demanded customizations for Windows 11 as Windhawk mods.
Below is a table with features that are available in Windows 10 but are missing in Windows 11. Some of the features are part of Windows 10 (marked with the 
icon) and some are part of 7+ Taskbar Tweaker (marked with the 
icon). Please vote for the features that you’d like to have back in Windows 11. I’ll prioritize implementing the most requested features as Windhawk mods. For each implemented feature, the page will be updated to reflect the current status.
Voting can be done in two ways, simple voting and a donation. I added the donation option to be able to give extra priority to votes of users who wish to support the project with a donation. To vote with a donation, add the feature hashtag to the donation comment like this. Donations are a great motivating factor (thanks!), and I think that letting supporters decide where to focus first is a nice perk.
| Feature | Votes | Donations | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Right click: Standard window menu |
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| Middle click: Switch to / Minimize / Close |
✔️ Partial | ||
| Dropping: Open with |
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| Hovering: List / Tooltip / Nothing |
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| Thumbnails: Drag to reorder |
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| Thumbnails: Left click on the active thumbnail minimizes the window |
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| Pinned items: Remove extra gap between items |
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| Pinned items: Open with double click |
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| Grouping: Don’t group |
✔️ Partial | ||
| Grouping: When not grouping, place new items next to the existing ones |
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| Grouping: Don’t group pinned items |
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| Grouping: Drag within/between groups using right mouse button |
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| Left click on combined item: Cycle through windows |
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| Mouse wheel: Cycle between taskbar buttons |
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| Minimize/restore when mouse is over: Taskbar buttons / Thumbnails |
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| Control volume when mouse is over: The taskbar / The notification area |
✅ Done | ||
| Customize double/middle click on empty space |
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| Hide the Start button |
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| Hide the “Show desktop” button |
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| Display seconds on the tray clock |
✅ Done | ||
| Reserve empty space on taskbar |
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| Change the size of taskbar icons |
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| Taskbar Inspector |
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| Decombine taskbar buttons |
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| Show labels in taskbar buttons |
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| Taskbar on the top of the screen |
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| Taskbar on the side of the screen |
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| Open Taskbar Manager via right click |
If a feature that you’d like to see in Windows 11 is not in the table, please let me know in the comments below.
Tags: 7+ taskbar tweaker, windhawk
“Hide the “Show desktop” button” разве эта не та опция, которая управляется в окне параметров?
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
Параметр TaskbarSd со значением 1 или 0.
Почти. С TaskbarSd кнопка отключается, но от нее все равно остается немного занятого места справа. “Hide the “Show desktop” button” подразумевает скрытие этого пустого места.
Add a way to customize the icon size of the taskbar..
Thanks for the suggestion, added with the name “Change the size of taskbar icons”. I assume you’re looking for something like the w10_large_icons advanced option.
By the way, I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks like there’s a registry option to change the size of the taskbar, perhaps you’ll find it useful:
https://www.howtogeek.com/759589/how-to-make-your-taskbar-larger-or-smaller-on-windows-11/
You’re right ! I used this option and it was working since last insider version. (the same version that contain the new task manager and also fix drag & drop in taskbar).
It seem Microsoft removed this option because it don’t have any effect anymore. I tried 3 size. But it could be nice to have something in Windhawk that allow to decide icon size in pixels and maybe to control padding of each of them.
Two requests please:
“Notification area: Remove extra gap between items” (recently added, major annoyance for some)
“Notification area: Drag to reorder items” (recently removed)
Please vote for “Pinned items: Remove extra gap between items”, it’s related, and I’ll look at controlling the gap in the notification area too when I’ll look at it.
What do you mean? I think you can reorder the icons in all Windows 11 versions, except for the volume and network icons which are implemented differently. Or did you mean reordering these two?
in newer insider builds you can’t drag and drop tray icons anymore, though as it’s insider it may not be intentional
Yes, insider builds. Was introduced along with the new gap, which is there for tablet mode touch interactions. That the gap is also in desktop mode suggests standardization of UI appearance. But on desktop it doesn’t make sense so feels forced upon us. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the loss of drag and drop ordering is similarly forced and intentional: maybe via touch it’s easy to drag icons accidentally, so it’s universally gone. That would make sense since some users toggle both modes and need a consistent experience.
okay, apparently it was semi-intentional, but it was also reverted in latest build
https://i.imgur.com/uWdcsoy.jpeg this too pls
That would be “Customize double/middle click on empty space”, vote for it.
Would this: https://i.imgur.com/8PCHW4M.png also fall under that category?
I’m using this with mouse4 and mouse5 and it’s really useful. On a side note, if it’s implemented, a way to achieve this without editing the registry would be great.
Thank you for your work.
Yes, I can’t promise that it will be possible in the first version of the mod, but I’d eventually like to make it possible. Adding configuration to mods is easier than adding it to the tweaker, so no registry editing will be necessary.
The only option I need is this:
show_desktop_button_size which was in the extended options
Vote for “Hide the “Show desktop” button”, I’ll try to implement changing its size too when I look at it.
How about the “Left click on combined item: Open last window if inactive, otherwise open thumbnail preview”? I don’t see it on the list. Didn’t realize how much I’d miss that feature. Thanks!
Please vote for “Left click on combined item: Cycle through windows”. I’ll look into adding the option you mentioned, too.
Can you implement again the possibility to ctrl+middle click in order to kill an application?
Currently I have a “Mouse Button Control” in the advanced options defined as : “taskbaritem|ctrl+mclick = 8”
I’ll consider it as an addition for the “Middle click to close on the taskbar” mod, but I have other things which I’d like to implement before that.
Hi RaMMicHaeL,
Is it possible please to implement keyboard shortcuts for such things like:
– Move the button group containing the active window to the left\right
– Switch to the window which is located on the left\right to the active window on the taskbar (skip minimized windows)
This is my favorites!
Thanks!
Hi Yuri,
Thanks for the suggestions!
I’ll consider it, but currently it’s not a priority.
You can vote for “Mouse wheel: Cycle between taskbar buttons”, I’ll consider adding keyboard shortcuts too.
Believe it or not, but some visitors voted for some of the features more than once. It’s not difficult to cheat and vote more than once, but please don’t do that, it just creates an incorrect representation of what most users want to see implemented, and it creates extra work for me to clean it up.
First of all, thank you for the continued work on these added features that, honestly, should have been (at least partially) included in Windows by default.
For me, the most used features are:
– Middle click to close (which I see is already implemented)
– Ctrl+middle click to force close (taskbaritem|ctrl+mclick = 8)
– Mouse button 6 to open a new instance (taskbaritem|x2click = 4)
– Dragging within/between groups using the right mouse button
As far as showing label go, I’m seriously considering using Start11 when switching to Windows 11. It would be really cool if you could somehow make some features work with that (like dragging within/between groups with right click), instead of only trying to implement everything from scratch.
Any way to implement a fix on the borders of the clock? To make it wrap around the actual size? I mean this: https://imgur.com/a/4cAOFrC
I like the shorter clock format but the extra space bugs me
I looked a it. That’s the default behavior of the taskbar, and I didn’t find an easy way to change it. I’ll try to look at it again in the future when I have some spare time.
Windows 11’s new taskbar broke the ability to drag files/images/etc. onto taskbar icons in order to open a different window. Now you have to have both windows visible in order to drag something between them, which is maddening.
If this is possible to fix with Windhawk, would you add it to the table?
As far as I know, Microsoft is going to fix this in Windows 11 version 22H2 which is about to be released soon.
Ah okay, that’s good to hear then. Thanks!
Drag to reorder Windows is obviously top feature. Can we have profiles or layouts to save the positions of the tabs accross virtual desktops ?
This would be amazing when u have 100 tabs.
I would like to donate for the Reserve empty space on taskbar feature, but paypal is not available in my country and I also don’t have bitcoin. I was the one who requested this feature (huge thanks to the developer for making my request) and maybe no one is using it. Honestly, I’m still using windows 7, but I’d like this feature already in case I have to upgrade in the future. I hope i can use windows 7 until i get old. Hoping to make a big donation in the future…
Would be nice to be able to drag things to the taskbar and it would open the window/folder. For eg if you wanted to drap something from one folder to another. Thanks
Microsoft is going to fix this in Windows 11 version 22H2 which is about to be released soon.
Thanks so much! You’re making it really difficult for me staying on win10. I only need left orientation for taskbar, or the ability to save virtual desktops (shutdown makes me have to reorder programs)
Vertical taskbar omitted?
On a 4K 40″, the horizontal taskbar is no issue.
But on a 16:9 laptop with a 15″ screen, the inability to preserve every pixel of vertical real estate is a major encumbrance.
I imagine it’s beyond too difficult to implement as the codebase for the new taskbar doesn’t yet exist in the vertical format.
Will continue to use Explorer Patcher & 7+TT on my laptop for the no_width_limit vertical taskbar.
Many thanks for all your efforts
It’s not omitted, you can vote for “Taskbar on the side of the screen”. It’s indeed not easy to implement, and given that it’s also not one of the highest voted feature requests, it’s not a high priority for me at this point.
Is there a way to show the labels for running programs. If I use the don’t group add-in they are still just an icon. Thanks for all your great work!
At this time there’s no mod for it. You can vote for “Show labels in taskbar buttons”.