Rearrange taskbar buttons and system tray icons with Taskbar Shuffle

Posted on May 28, 2008 at 5:24 am

Looking for a way to rearrange taskbar icons or system tray icons? You would think it would be an obvious feature of Windows, but apparently not! By default, Windows will arrange the Taskbar icons by the order in which they were opened, the first program at the far left right next to the Quick Launch toolbar and then continuing to the right.

Same thing applies for the system tray icons, just the opposite direction. When you start windows, icons begin loading from the right hand side and moving to the left. This is fine for most people, but there are times when it’s nice to move an application on your taskbar to a different location.

For example, if you’re working with three applications and you need to keep going back and forth between them, it’s not possible to use ALT + TAB, you just have to click! Instead of one being on the left side of the screen and the other on the right, just move them next to each other.

Taskbar Shuffle is a nifty free Windows application that lets you drag and drop your Windows Taskbar buttons to rearrange them. Here’s a break down of the features:

Reorder the Taskbar buttons by simply dragging and dropping them
Reorder the system tray icons in the exact same way
Reorder tasks in a grouped button’s popup menu in the same way
Middle-click to automatically close programs on your Taskbar
Works with UltraMon Taskbars, if you use that
Tweak the Taskbar button grouping settings

So now I can do fun things like this. Here’s my Taskbar normally in Windows with three apps open:

Now let’s say I want to move my Firefox tab all the way to the right, so I just click on it, hold the button and drag it after the Skype button:

Sweet! Pretty easy and quite handy at times. Same way with your system tray! Let’s take a look at what it looks like right now:

Now let’s arrange it the way I want it to be instead of the way Windows does it:

If you double-click on the Taskbar Shuffle system tray icon, you can configure some basic settings:

You can change how the grouping works for similar taskbar buttons by changing it from the default, which is order by when they were started. You can change how many windows of a similar task before grouping starts and to group, but not into one button.

The memory usage on this program is less than 4MB and when I checked it on my computer, it was close to 1MB. Also, you cannot currently save the order of the buttons on your Taskbar, but this will hopefully be there in the next version according to the developer.

Overall, it’s a great program if you run a bunch of programs at once, which is something I do all the time! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: rearrange taskbar, arrange system tray, rearrange windows taskbar, rearrange taskbar icons, xp rearrange taskbar, rearrange taskbar items, rearrange taskbar buttons

Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to Online Tech Tips via RSS Feed or via Email and receive free daily productivity tips.

» Filed Under Computer Tips

Save this page	Stir it up on Mixx
Add to Reddit	Stumble this page

7 Responses to “Rearrange taskbar buttons and system tray icons with Taskbar Shuffle”

Abhijeet from Jeet Blog said on : May 28th, 2008 at 5:59 am

This is certainly a nifty tool. I always drag and drop my firefox tabs but wondered if I could do the same in my taskbar. Thanks !

wongsk said on : May 28th, 2008 at 7:06 am

Taskix also have these similar function.

http://taskix.robustit.com/

abhishek said on : May 28th, 2008 at 10:38 am

quite good tool…i am using it for a week or so

akishore said on : May 28th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

Abhijeet - Rearranging my taskbar is not something I do often, but it’s definitely useful on certain occasions.

Wongsk - Thanks for the mention of Taskix, looks like a good alternative.

Abhishek - I’m glad you are using it!

Shankar Ganesh said on : May 29th, 2008 at 2:30 am

I’ve used it before, and I’ve wondered why Windows doesn’t even allow you to do this little thing

Steve Yu said on : May 29th, 2008 at 2:38 am

Seem like a nice tool to me. I’ll give a try.

Greg said on : October 2nd, 2008 at 10:33 am

It’s a really great tool, however opening and closing windows runs a bit slower than normal. I usually keep it closed until I need to rearrange my taskbar, then close it afterwards.