v1.1.0 — icons, Fluent look, direct jump

DeskTabs v1.1.0 is a big step for how the bar looks and how much you can do without touching a file.

New

Fluent look. The bar is now drawn with GDI+: rounded tabs, anti-aliased text, subtle vertical gradients, and the active desktop tinted in its own colour (the hue is kept and only the lightness comes from the theme, so colours stay clean instead of muddy). Hovering lightens a tab the way the Windows 11 taskbar buttons do. The active style is switchable: own desktop colour, uniform accent colour, or a solid fill.

Tab icons. Give a desktop an icon and the bar shows it:

• Icon library built into the app: the whole Segoe Fluent Icons font that Windows 11 ships with (1533 icons), with a search box that works in English and German, quick filters by topic, a scrollable grid and hover names. Library icons are drawn in the desktop's own colour.
• From a website: type a domain and DeskTabs fetches the site icon in the best resolution it can find (apple-touch-icon, large rel=icon, favicon.ico, favicon service) and caches it.
• Your own image file (.ico/.png/.jpg/.bmp/.gif).
• Take the colour from the icon: derives the dominant colour of a fetched icon and uses it for that desktop.
• In the compact "icon" level a tab with an icon shows only that icon, at taskbar size on a square chip.

Direct jump. Clicking a tab now jumps straight to that desktop in one step instead of stepping through the desktops in between. Measured on Windows 11 25H2 (26200) the focused window stays where it is; if a build does drag it along, DeskTabs moves it right back. The old step-by-step switching is still available in the menu.

Help, feedback and updates. A Help menu with the documentation, the changelog, "Report a bug" and "Suggest an idea" (both open a pre-filled GitHub issue), an e-mail to the author, and an update check. Once a day DeskTabs asks the GitHub releases API for the latest version number (nothing else is sent) and shows a tray hint if a newer release exists; switch it off with UpdateCheck = 0. Plus an About dialog with version, licence and links.

More polish.

• The right-click menu carries icons, and the tray icon now opens the full settings menu directly.
• The colour submenu shows named colour swatches instead of hex codes.
• DeskTabs has its own app icon.
• The drag handle shows the move cursor.
• No more flicker: the bar paints itself from a buffer and only redraws when something visibly changed.

Fixed

• Hovering a tab no longer flickers.
• Drawing and hit-testing in the icon library could break after the first hover (a case-insensitive name collision in the code).

Configuration

Everything the menu does can also be set in settings.ini, and changes are picked up within about a second, no restart. New keys: ActiveStyle, TintL, TintS, GradientPct, HoverPct, CornerRadius, TabMargin, ShowIcons, IconSize, IconOnlySize, IconGap, ShowDividers, UpdateCheck, SwitchMethod. New sections: [Icons] (Desktop name = URL, path or glyph:E713).

Install

Download the ZIP, unpack it anywhere and run DeskTabs.exe. Keep the folder together: VirtualDesktopAccessor.dll is required, lang\ holds the language files and data\glyph-names.txt makes the icon library searchable. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first start because the executable is not signed: "More info" → "Run anyway".

There is no auto-update. If you want a new version, download it here or run setup.ps1 again.

Credits

The icon library uses the Segoe Fluent Icons font that Windows 11 ships with (nothing is bundled) and the official icon names from the Microsoft documentation under CC BY 4.0. See THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md.