Taskbar Application Manager

Windows GUI utilities written in C++.(to help you hide chatgpt when teacher is looking for it in 1 second)

Editions

Taskbar Application Manager is the full edition. It can:

• list the visible application windows which normally receive taskbar buttons;
• hide or restore a selected window;
• hide a selected app's taskbar button while keeping its window visible, and restore it later in the same session;
• bind a global toggle shortcut to hide/restore a selected window, or hide/restore its taskbar button;
• hide or show its own taskbar button;
• enable or disable Windows taskbar auto-hide.

Taskbar Application Manager Lite retains all window and taskbar controls, but deliberately excludes global shortcut binding and the associated UI.

To hide a taskbar button, the utilities briefly hide the target window, change its extended window style to WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW, then immediately show it again. This is the sequence documented by Microsoft for dynamic taskbar-button changes. It can be rejected for elevated, protected, or packaged/UWP applications and normally also removes the window from Alt+Tab. The utilities do not replace the selected app's icon image.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3. See LICENSE.

Build

With Visual Studio's Developer PowerShell:

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

Run build\Release\TaskbarApplicationManager.exe for the full edition or build\Release\TaskbarApplicationManagerLite.exe for Lite. With a single-config generator, omit Release.

Alternatively, compile Lite directly with MSVC:

cl /std:c++17 /EHsc /DUNICODE /D_UNICODE TaskbarApplicationManagerLite.cpp /link /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS shell32.lib ole32.lib