drag & drop windows taskbar buttons?

December 21, 2005 8:00 PM

Is there a program that allows me to drag and drop (reorder) the buttons in the XP taskbar? Something similar to the Firefox drag and drop for tabs?
posted by masymas to Technology (10 answers total)

If you're actually referring to buttons on the taskbar (or more properly, icons embedded in toolbars), XP allows you to do this very thing out of the box. If you want to move the toolbars around, rightclick on the taskbar, deselect 'Lock the taskbar' and go to town.

If you're referrring to open windows represented by 'buttons' on the taskbar, your options are limited beyond selecting 'Group similar taskbar buttons' in the property sheet for the taskbar (rightclick-->properties).

If, as I suspect, you're referring to the system tray rather than the taskbar, you're out of luck, as far as I know.

Your question is unclear.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:49 PM on December 21, 2005

Have you actually tried moving them yet? You can do this on as early as Win98se as far as I know.
posted by vanoakenfold at 9:21 PM on December 21, 2005

TaskArrange
posted by Rhomboid at 10:01 PM on December 21, 2005

Best answer: And for the record, no, I don't think you can do this on any version of windows out-of-the-box. He's not talking about the quick launch or the tray, he's talking about the actual windows in the task bar.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:02 PM on December 21, 2005

Response by poster: TaskArrange (thanks Rhomboid) does it, but I'd also like to drag/drop those buttons like one rearranges tabs in Firefox 1.5.

Here's a screenshot.
posted by masymas at 1:37 AM on December 22, 2005

Best answer: A little Googling brought me to TaskBar++ on this page (stupid framesets). It's in japanese, but the animated screenshot is a universal language.
posted by Plutor at 6:15 AM on December 22, 2005

Best answer: Babelfish did a pretty good job translating the TaskBar++ page.
posted by Plutor at 6:17 AM on December 22, 2005

Wow—MeFi mindmeld! I was about to ask this very question just a couple days ago!
posted by limeonaire at 7:02 AM on December 22, 2005

You can do this with Groupbar, which is a separate program. "GroupBar is a prototype for demonstrating the use of window-grouping features in an XP TaskBar-like interface. The window tiles in the GroupBar can be rearranged in any order or dragged and dropped into lightweight "groups" that allow one-click task-switching and convenient group operations." (from Microsoft's download page). Small & doesn't need to be installed, IIRC.
posted by Pigpen at 10:19 AM on December 22, 2005

Just wanted to thank Plutor for TaskBar++, as I found it to be quite useful. It would be nice to reduce the alt-key delay, but it seems to do the job quite well.
posted by sysinfo at 1:19 PM on December 22, 2005