Task Bar Auto Hide

When I set the Task Bar to Auto Hide in the Task Bar Behaviors section of the Personalization settings, the Task Bar will auto hide when the mouse moves away from it. What is frustrating is that the Task Bar will reappear when the mouse gets close to the bottom edge of the screen. This is very frustrating when working in software apps that require mouse movements near the bottom of their windows.

Is there a way to turn off the the Task Bar reappearing with the mouse and have it reappear with a keystroke instead? Or have it reappear with an assigned hotspot on the corner of the screen instead of the bottom edge?

I don't know if the custom setting of WinXcorners can be programed to do what you want or not. How to Add the Hot Corners Feature From macOS to Windows 11
I have found that running apps full screen is the culprit. Here's the way I solved it.
1. In properties, set program to run as normal window.
2. close and reopen program.
3. drag the edges of the window to almost fill the screen. Make sure you leave enough space at the bottom that you can see a small portion of your desktop below the window. I allowed enough to accommodate the size of my taskbar but you do not have to be that precise..
4. Windows will remember the size of the window the next time you open it. (If per chance it doesn't resize the window again and hit f5)
5. Now the mouse does not activate the taskbar until it is positioned at the very botton edge of your screen.

Wow, Hot corners appear to be a great feature that Windows is lacking. I believe you are correct, though, that it won't be able to stop the Taskbar from flying up when the mouse gets near the bottom edge of the screen unless there were some additional programming involved.

My issue is I'm running DAW and chart viewing apps at the same time which takes up a lot of graphical real-estate. I literally do not have any more room on my screen and would like to be able to use every millimeter of my display. I can't use two monitors because I'm using my notebook to play live and my system must remain portable.

It would be wonderful if there were a timer involved in activating the Taskbar with the mouse at the bottom of the screen. For example, holding the mouse at the edge for more than 3 seconds would cause the Taskbar to reappear instead of it instantly flying up when the mouse gets near the edge. This way occasionally bumping the mouse into the bottom of the screen while working in apps near that lower region would not cause the Taskbar to fly up.

Since the last Windows update that took away the option to make the Taskbar smaller, I've been using auto-hide. It was troublesome in the way described. I came across an old program that gives a delay to the Taskbar un-hiding. Although old, it still works in W.11. The Taskbar will only un-hide if the mouse is left at the bottom of the screen for a time set by the user. I find 400ms is about right but the delay can be seconds if so wished.

Sorry put my good morning post here by mistake, so removed.

So I tried the Taskbar Activate app by: Pierre-Marie DEVIGNE, pmdevigne@nordnet.fr, http://home.nordnet.fr/~pmdevigne/

This app appears to be a perfect solution for my taskbar activation issue except for after I installed it in Win 11 my Taskbar disappeared and I had no way to bring it back unless I uninstalled the app. I also tried it on Win 10 and the same thing happened. I emailed the creator of the app and currently waiting of a response. I will update as soon as I get an answer.

Sorry you had this problem. The program works OK on my computer. Might the delay time have been set too high? Even though you won't have been able to open the program settings via the icon in the System Tray (because of the Taskbar not being visible), the shortcut to it can still be found in Start Menu and the delay setting changed by opening the program from there. Also maybe worth a mention is that the mouse pointer needs dragging to absolutely as far as it will go and letting it stay for the delay period.

Carb said:

after I installed it in Win 11 my Taskbar disappeared

Click to expand...

If you are using another app that affects the GUI such as startisback, start11,explorerpatcher, etc there would be a conflict between the 2 apps.

Depending on your graphics card you may be able to enable a "super resolution". This is a larger resolution than the native of your monitor resized to the native resolution. This doesn't give you more detail than the monitor can show but it gives you more display area as if you were using the larger resolution. For example my monitor has native resolution 1440x900 but I can enable DSR (dynamic super resolution) in nVidia settings to get 1920x1200. AMD and relatively new Intel graphics drivers have a similar function at screen settings. So you can have a normal application window as large as possible without using the application full screen. So you can leave some empty space at the bottom to avoid showing the taskbar by accident. You may not even have to hide it in the first place.

glasskuter said:

If you are using another app that affects the GUI such as startisback, start11,explorerpatcher, etc there would be a conflict between the 2 apps.

Click to expand...

I have it working OK alongside Start11. Maybe some of the others mentioned could make a difference. One thing (maybe a drawback) is that the cursor needs to be completely dragged to the bottom of the screen. If even the tip of it can be seen, the Taskbar doesn't un-hide.

The program puts a line at the bottom of the screen. It is around a few pixels deep. The cursor needs to be dragged below that for the delayed un-hiding of the Taskbar. The line takes on the system default colour but there is an option to make it a colour of choice. I made mine black to match the Taskbar colour.