Killing the Taskbar (on Windows 10)

EDIT: It has come to my attention that Launchy is no longer in development. As an alternative, I recommend you switch to WoX or Zazu.

The day I started writing the draft for this article, I came across an article named “Kill The Dock (for MacOS)” by Michael Rurka — ルデ (read it here). The gist of the article is that you should hide the dock and replace it to be more productive. Reading the article, I left a comment saying that I would give it a try. Immediately, the Rurka responded, asking me if I could share my experience if I do try it. Lo and behold, this article was written.

Now, in the past, I’ve tried something similar to this. I installed a program by the name of Launchy, and tried opening programs with it. I tried for a total time of about 10 minutes and then uninstalled it. Why? I felt like I had no use for it. Then, I preferred to scroll through my app list to find what I needed. But after reading Rurka’s article, I decided to give it a try again.

So, before I did anything, I changed my taskbar settings to be similar to the ones in Rurka’s article. I set the taskbar to autohide. Now, unlike MacOS, all of the status information is also on the taskbar, so that’s going to be hidden too. Now, if you’re like me. It might not be that big of a deal to you.

Go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > “Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode” to “On”. You can also turn on “Use small taskbar buttons” if you wish.

After I did that, I installed Launchy and set it up with the help of this Lifehacker article. It’s a little bit dated, but Launchy hasn’t changed so much that it’s completely inaccurate.

There wasn’t that much I wanted to change. The only thing I really changed was the skin to Mercury Modern by ThePC007 (you add skins by unzipping the folder and moving it to C:\Program Files (x86)\Launchy\skins), and I also configured some of the plugins. I configured Weby to only search DuckDuckGo and YouTube since I never used anything else.

So, as I’m setting this up, I realize that whenever I open something with Launchy, instead of opening up the current instance, it opens up a new instance. I don’t want it to constantly open a new Chrome window! After doing some more searching on the internet, I was having trouble figuring out how to change Launchy to open current instances of windows. Then, I went to their website and clicked on the “Plugins” page.

Tasky is the plugin that I needed in order to fix my little problem.

For whatever reason, Tasky wasn’t installed by default. So I had to download and install Tasky and restart Launchy in order for the plugin to be there. (Installing plugins is just like installing skins, except you move the *.dll file to the “plugins” folder.)

Now, if I want to open a currently running instance, I have to type “tasky”, hit Tab, and just use the arrow keys to find the app I want. This allows you to see every app that’s currently running. For most apps, just typing the name of the app, then hitting the down arrow key until you find your app ending in “.tasky” will work as well.

Using Tasky

I haven’t figured out a way to make Launchy use Tasky by default, but when I do find out, I’ll update this article.

So, now that I’ve talked about setting up Launchy, on of the things I’ve learned is that it doesn’t launch apps installed from the Windows Store. If you want it to, there are a few workarounds, but they’re pretty complicated.

So there we have it. We now have Launchy set up and our taskbar banished in the name of productivity. How does it feel? Productive?

Here’s an example on how it looks: http://imgur.com/uMwqcev (the GIF was too large for Medium for some reason).

Now, I’m still trying this out. There’s also a lot you can do with Launchy, such as open folders, but I don’t have that set up because I prefer using Windows Explorer.

Try this out for a couple of days. See how you like only using Launchy. If not, it’s easy to switch back. Just change back your settings and uninstall Launchy.

I’m an African American teenager that loves computers and graphics. https://www.lbetv.com/jedii

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