How to organize the buttons on the XP taskbar?

March 30, 2009 6:09 PM

Does anyone know of a modification for windows XP that allows you shuffle/organize the buttons on the taskbar, like the tabs on Internet Explorer or Firefox?

I sometimes work with 20 windows open or more at once with many different programs and sometimes i get confused with which one is for what because many of them are similar, I know in XP you can group similar taskbar buttons but this wouldn't work for me.

posted by jakubsnm to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Taskbar Shuffle will let you rearrange them.

"Taskbar Shuffle is a simple, small, free utility that lets you drag and drop your Windows taskbar buttons to rearrange them. "

http://nerdcave.webs.com/taskbarshuffle.htm
posted by mattdini at 6:12 PM on March 30, 2009

Taskbar Shuffle is pretty neat, but if it locks up for some reason (rare, but it happened to me on several occasions) it'll do odd things to your taskbar like leaving some buttons "ghosted" under your mouse pointer or making the taskbar nonresponsive. All that needs to be done to fix this is to end the taskbar shuffle's process in task manager.
posted by boo_radley at 6:19 PM on March 30, 2009

Not exactly what you are looking for, but when I moved to a widescreen notebook, I moved my taskbar to the left side of the screen. The programs stack rather than line up, and I can fit plenty of them on there. And I can read what the title is.
posted by gjc at 6:38 PM on March 30, 2009

Thirding Taskbar Shuffle, it's exactly what you're looking for. I've never had any of the problems boo_radley describes.
posted by oulipian at 6:39 PM on March 30, 2009

I have used Taskbar++ for a few years (site is in japanese, click on Taskbar ++ on the sidebar, Links at the top of the page for zip and exe) and love it.

You just hold down 'alt' and click/drag the program buttons where you want them.
posted by effigy at 6:40 PM on March 30, 2009

Taskix'll do it too, and it's less glitchy in my experience.

http://taskix.robustit.com/

P.S. Middle-click closes windows, which is just wonderful until you're working on a machine that doesn't have TBS/Taskix, then you go crazy.
posted by Plug Dub In at 6:40 PM on March 30, 2009

Taskbar Shuffle also lets you move items in your system tray, if that's bothering you.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:00 PM on March 30, 2009

Taskix is slightly less pretty then Taskbar Shuffle, but uses a lot less memory.

Taskix works effectively in my opinion, and it's what I use.
posted by gryftir at 7:12 PM on March 30, 2009

I use Taskbar Shuffle and haven't experienced any problems with it. I like it because you just click and drag to rearrange, rather than having to hold down a key while clicking and dragging.
posted by katyggls at 8:03 PM on March 30, 2009

I use taskbar shuffle, which is great, but I've also found it helps to double the height of the task bar so that it's two "rows" tall. That's just a normal Windows option. Apologies if this is an obvious suggestion.
posted by mullacc at 8:27 PM on March 30, 2009

Not an answer to your question per se, but you'll be pleased to hear that Windows 7's redesigned taskbar solves this problem.
posted by lunchbox at 8:45 PM on March 30, 2009

Response by poster: Woo hoo.... didn't expect this much feedback. Thanx guys
posted by jakubsnm at 10:13 PM on March 30, 2009