Turn Windows 11 Taskbar into MacOS Dock with TaskbarXI

Windows 11’s Taskbar is not very customizable, aside from some visual effects that you can change. There are many alternatives to this problem and third-party software that can help you tailor the Taskbar to your liking and the software I am talking about is TaskbarXI.

Change the Taskbar on Windows 11 into a MacOS Dock with TaskbarXI

This C++ program aims to inherit TaskbarX (formerly FalconX), from the same developer, but TaskbarXI is still in the early stages of development. It has no interface yet. The project’s website says that GUI under development, as well as options to change the taskbar background style and color.

So even at this stage, it still offers some good features. TaskbarXI also has a portable version, which you can download from The project’s GitHub page, run the executable and it’s ready to use. You may not notice a difference if you maximize the window (full-screen), ie the taskbar will look normal. But when you open a minimized window or switch to the desktop, the tool minimizes the taskbar to a dock, with the wallpaper spilling to the edges. The system tray and clock are separated from the taskbar and look like an extra dock.

The edges of the dock are rounded, but there is a jagged effect due to the lack of anti-aliasing in Windows 11. This tool can display the taskbar on multiple monitors, and also supports the system tray. and clock. If you are someone who doesn’t like the taskbar centered, then you can left-align the taskbar by going to Personalization > Taskbar screen.

I think it will look better when centered, because the left align style creates a gap between the taskbar and the system tray, which looks a bit weird. TaskbarXI also supports separate DPI scaling.

This application works with both dark and light themes in Windows 11. Currently there is no option to make any changes, so you cannot change the size of the taskbar or the transparency, enable the automatic feature. Since there is no GUI, the only way to close the program is to open Taskmanager and kill Taskbar11.exe (name includes version number, e.g. Taskbar11_1.0.0.0.exe) and has the description “Windows 11” Taskbar Mod”.

I encountered a few cases where the taskbar was lost. It happened once when PotPlayer was running in windowed mode, but other cases were random. However, understandably, this is an alpha version anyway, so it may not be stable.

But this is also a good start to the first release, although in my opinion RoundedTB has similar features and a more user-friendly interface. There are other open source options you can choose to customize the Windows 11 Taskbar, including TranslucentTB, ElevenClock, and more.

Note: TaskbarXI is developed by Chris Andriessen, not to be confused with Dustin Hendriks’ Taskbar11.

If you want a nicer Start Menu, with Open Shell, this is also a free and open source tool. There are some paid alternatives that you can choose like Start11 or StartAllBack, I haven’t used these two, so don’t know if they are better than Open Shell.