Dave Donaldson

Taskbar Shuffle

Wednesday, September 26 2007

I don't know how many other people are like this, but I prefer the items in my Windows taskbar to be in a specific order. Actually, it's really just the first four apps I use, in this order: Outlook, Windows Explorer, Firefox, and Visual Studio. Anything I open after Visual Studio I don't really care where in the taskbar order it falls, but those first four are important. I know, kind of weird. It's gotta be some sort of disease.

Anyway, every so often I would like to rearrange the items in my taskbar. You know how it is. Some application closes, either willingly or not, and when you re-open it your precious taskbar is out of order and the only way to get things back is to close everything and re-open all the apps you had opened in the desired order. I've operated this way for years. Like I said, it's a disease.

Well, someone has written a cure and it is called Taskbar Shuffle. This little utility runs in your system tray and when you turn it on allows you to simply drag-and-drop items in your taskbar to their desired position. It even allows you to do the same thing to the items in your system tray (just hold down the CTRL key for that). It's a well-written little tool and is free to boot. Check it out.