I want to show you how you can completely customize your taskbar in windows 11, we'll look at some of the basics like how to move all of your app icons over to the left-hand side we'll look at how you can turn on or off some of the default icons we'll look at how you can move your taskbar to the top of the screen how you can change the app icon size and we'll even look at an amazing third party tool that allows you to set a transparent background on your taskbar.

 Let's check these out we’re going to start with the basics how do you even place an app on your taskbar well it turns out it's pretty simple within windows simply click on search and you could type in an app name here for example I’ve typed in whiteboard you can then right click on it and you can select pin to taskbar you can also open up an application and when it's open you'll see the icon on your taskbar.

You can right click on that icon and then you can select pin to taskbars let's say you no longer want an app appearing on your taskbar well you follow the exact same flow simply right click on the app icon on your taskbar and then you can select unpin you might have noticed that the five icons over on the left hand side behave just a little bit differently the first icon all the way over on the left this is probably the most recognizable.

This is your standard windows logo icon and left clicking omit launches the start menu but did you know as a quick aside if you right click on it that opens up what some refer to as the secret start menu when you right click on it you can quickly get back to settings you could launch the task manager you could open up file explorer you could even shut down and restart your computer and this always appears on your taskbar the next four icons are included by default.

You have your search icon you have multiple desktops you have widgets and you have the Microsoft teams icon but let's say you don't want these appearing on your taskbar well you can very easily get rid of them simply right click on your taskbar and select taskbar settings within settings right up at the top youkan toggle on or off whether you want those four icons appearing on your taskbar while we're in settings.

Let’s move down and look at the taskbar corner settings you have something called pen you have a touch keyboard and you also have a touch pad here I’ll turn on keyboard and you'll notice in the bottom right hand corner a new icon appears fora keyboard and when I click on that that opens up a virtual keyboard on my screen next up there's something called the taskbar corner overflow or what in the past was referred to as the task tray here.

I currently have one drive turned on and if I look down in the bottom right hand corner I see a OneDrive icon directly on my taskbar I can click on that and I can access various one drive controls if instead I toggle that to off it no longer appears on my taskbar and instead it’s now in the overflow category here when I click on the overflow icon here can now access OneDrive the last bucket of settings is called taskbar behavior and the very first one allows you to move all of your taskbar icons over to the left hand side this way it looks a little bit more like windows 10 instead of the default centered look that you get with windows11.

You can also automatically hide your taskbar this way the taskbar will only appear when you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen the next one allows you to turn on or off badges on your taskbar here when we look at my taskbar on the to do app currently have a badge on it if I turn it off that badge disappears if you have multiple monitors you can decide whether you just want your taskbar to appear on your main monitor or you could have it show up on all of your monitors if you decide to have it show up on all of your monitors you have some additional customization you can set it so your additional monitors only show the appestat you have open on that particular monitor the very last option says select the bottom corner to show desktop.

If you turn this on and you go to the far right hand bottom corner of your screen on the taskbar you can click and that will minimize all apps and you’ll see your desktop if you click on it again it'll restore all the apps that you previously minimized now as an alternative you can also press the shortcut key windows together with dad is in desktop and that'll accomplish the same exact thing although we finished looking at all the taskbar settings there are still a few more taskbar settings within settings let's click into personalization then select colors here we can select an accent color and you can show the accent color on the taskbar.

Here I’ll pick a color and there you see it on my taskbar those are all of the settings that you can access directly in the ox or the user experience but there are still a few more settings that we can modify if you're willing we have to go into the registry and we could change a few values to modify the look of the taskbar if you're brave enough let's check it out to get to the windows registry editor click on your search icon assuming that you haven't turned it off in a previous step within search type in registry editor and then click on the best match.

First I want to show you how you can resize the icons on your taskbar up in the location address field type in the following location I’ve included this link in the description so you could simply copy and paste that in once you're in this location right click on the screen and select new then select d word and then type in the name task bar s I s I as in size here you could enter in one of three values if you type in a zero that will give you the smallest taskbar icons if you type in a one that's the default size that you already have so if you want to restore it back simply type in one and if you type in two this will give you the largest sized icons on your taskbar.

Once you make that settings change we’re not quite done yet we have to restart windows explorer to do that let's open up the task manager you can press ctrl shift and escape and that'll open up the task manager within the task manager find the process titled windows explorer right click on that and then select restarts soon as you do that you'll see the change to your taskbar you'll have either large icons or small icons also within the registry you can move your taskbar from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen head to the following location once again.

I’ve included that in the description down below so you could simply copy and paste that in once you navigate there click on the file named settings and within settings highlight this specific cell currently it’s set to o3 03 defines that the taskbar appears at the bottom of the screen we can change that value to 0 1then click on kind then we could once again restart windows explorer and when you do that you’ll see that your taskbar is now on the top of the screen if you want to move it back to the bottom you could simply repeat those steps and instead of entering zero one enter in zero three those are all of the settings that we can modify directly out of the box.

I want to show you a pretty phenomenal tool that gives you even more control it’s called taskbar 11 made by Chris Andreessen to get the taskbar 11 tool head to the following GitHub website once you land on the page expand the assets category and then download the release.zip file once you finish downloading the file extract it and then double click on theconfigurator.exe file this will install taskbar 11 on your computer once you finish installing launch the application and you'll see that you have many additional options here I can settle background to transparent I can set it to opaque I can set a gradient background I can even select and customize the colors that appear on my taskbar there are lots of different configuration settings if you decide you no longer want this tool on your computer make sure to uninstall through the app over on the left hand side you can click on uninstall and that'll remove the app alright well hopefully by now the taskbar looks exactly how you want it to look unfortunately you can't customize everything but this gives you a lot more power over what your taskbar looks.