- A new menu bar could be brought to Windows 11
- It would come in the form of an optional dock for the Command Palette in PowerToys
- This would include shortcuts to your favorite tools as well as system monitoring information, but it’s just a concept for now
Windows 11 may not allow you to move the taskbar to the top of the screen, but it can give you a top menu bar as a sort of replacement for that ability, and it’s an idea I like – but it turns out to be somewhat divisive.
Windows Central highlighted this potential new development, and I should make it clear up front that this is a proposed addition to PowerToys, Microsoft’s suite of add-on tools for Windows 11, and not a possible change to the operating system itself.
The new feature is an optional dock for the Command Palette, which is one of the tools in PowerToys – it’s essentially a launcher for Windows 11. (The Command Palette will eventually take over from the Run tool, though it’s still a work in progress at the moment).
Said dock comes in the form of a menu bar that can be positioned along the top (or sides, or indeed the bottom) of the Windows 11 desktop environment. It can carry information readouts for your system – like a small screen for CPU usage or internet speeds – as well as allowing you to attach your favorite functionality and PowerToys tools to the line.
As usual with PowerToys, if you really want to dig deep into the feature, there will be all sorts of customization tricks possible, including changing the look of the dock with a different background or having it use a light or dark theme.
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So this is sort of a PowerToys-focused taskbar alternative that you can deploy anywhere as mentioned, giving you more quick and convenient access to these utilities and a number of features besides, along with at-a-glance screens for system information.
I like the idea and will welcome this addition to PowerToys, although some people are not too happy with the idea of losing the desktop property to another bar (with the taskbar already along the bottom of the screen, of course). That’s fair enough, and you don’t have to turn on the Command Palette dock if you don’t want to. (Assuming it ever gets made, that is – we don’t know if this project has any legs yet, it’s just a concept right now).
The Dock might work better if the bar was only visible if you moved the mouse over the top (or side) area of the screen where it is located.
There are others who approve of this idea in principle, but would rather see it implemented as a full taskbar replacement. This means you can add Windows 11 taskbar items as ‘widgets’ to this dock, then permanently hide the taskbar by using this instead of that (and placing it wherever you want, of course). Realistically though, I can’t see that happening – PowerToys isn’t designed to replace Windows 11 functionality, it’s an add-on pack of extras.
Since Microsoft seems to have just turned over a new leaf in terms of improving Windows 11 – promising to root out bugs and spice up performance levels and overall responsiveness – perhaps this new stance might just include giving us long-awaited capabilities like moving the taskbar after all? I doubt it, given how far we’ve come with this functionality remaining banished from Microsoft’s latest OS, but you never know.
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