Keep Old-fashioned Taskbar on the Left on Windows 11

[AllanChain]

View Post on Blog

Windows 11 comes with awesome new features for developers as well as insane taskbar settings. Don't let the awful taskbar design stop you from upgrading!

---

Not having Windows11 yet? Get it here!

The process is surprisingly simple but hard to find. You just need to know https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher .

Install ExplorerPatcher

For latest instructions, follow README and release notes.

ExplorerPatcher brings the old Windows 10 taskbar back, together with some other tweaks. I am on 22000.194.25 and the installation is pretty simple:

1. Download dxgi.dll here
2. Copy it to C:\Windows (needs administrator permission grant)
3. Restart explorer.exe from the task manager
4. Wait for explorer.exe to download ~40M of Microsoft files (can take a while, can be monitored in the network section of task manager)

Follow README for other customization. You probably need Win + X and "Enable missing system tray icons".

Then you will get something like ExplorerPatcher's demo:

Moving taskbar to left

As you can see in the first image, I prefer the taskbar docked on the left side.

Open regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects3, and edit Settings. Change the following part to 00:

And here is the meaning of the numbers:

Number	Position
00	Left
01	Top
02	Right
03	Bottom

And don't forget to restart explorer.exe to make changes take effect.

Make smaller icons

Large icons look ugly on a vertical taskbar →_→ Let's make them smaller.

Again in regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced, change TaskbarSmallIcons to 1.

Again, restart explorer.exe.

Done

If everything goes well, you will get an old-fashioned taskbar like mine!