ToggleTaskbar - hot corner, F12 or dock

ToggleTaskbar - hot corner, F12 or dock
Submitted December 25, 2009 by Dallas
Based on work by myself + various contributors as credited in the Description
5 comments, 635 downloads
3 votes

This little program lets you easily kill or resurrect the windows taskbar.

The triggers are:

- A shortcut on your dock
- F12
- One or more hot corners which you choose (You move your mouse to a specified corner and the taskbar disappears, move it there again and it reappears.)

This is far better than the standard Windows taskbar autohide mechanism because, with this, the taskbar doesn't appear unless you really want it to. (I find with autohide, it pops up annoyingly anytime I happen to drift near the side it's on.)

---------------

I give credit to the folks on this thread for the toggle mechanism:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic28385.html

And to Hotfoot on this thread for the Hot Corner function:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic5391.html

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Instructions:
Unzip it and save the folder where you wish.

Run ToggleTaskbar.exe.

Now, F12 will toggle the taskbar, and moving your mouse to the bottom left corner will too.

To trigger it from your dock, put a shortcut on your dock and point it to the F12.vbs file.

If you want a different corner (or multiple corners) to be your hot corner, right click the ToggleTaskbar tray icon and select "Configure" (which also allows you to set other optional settings including autostart with Windows).

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I have only tested this under Win7, and with low UAC settings. Would appreciate any feedback including any loading problems.

You might also like to try this variation:
http://rocketdock.com/addon/docklets/27798

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's AvatarDallas (January 7):

Thanks for the feedback!

I've updated again. Someone had asked for the sides to be hot, so you can now choose that too.

Added:
Ability to make any side Hot.

This is a bit like the standard Windows Autohide except it TOTALLY hides the taskbar when you drift over a side, and then it TOTALLY shows it when you drift there again.

's Avatartheantagonizer (January 3):

Awesome and very very useful!

5*

's AvatarMaiTriCks (January 3):

Nice this definetly does not deserve 1 star with the effort put into it. Thanks

's AvatarDallas (December 31, 2009):

31 Dec 2009

More updates:

1. Made it so you can choose to use hot corners or not.

2. Made a Settings mechanism by right clicking on the tray icon. You now don't have to edit the ini file directly since it's all done via a GUI.

3. Made a Start with windows option in Settings

's AvatarDallas (December 28, 2009):

29 Dec 2009

I have updated the code:

1. It's much more compact.

2. Changed the mechanism for preventing multiple triggers in the hot corner. (If you leave your mouse in the corner, you can get it to trigger multiple times.) I'd had the mouse moving a fraction away from the corner, but it was a bit disconcerting. I've now just put in a short sleep to give you plenty of time to move the mouse away, which I find I do naturally anyway, so you should never get multiple triggers unless you deliberately leave it there.

3. Discovered how to make the taskbar glide in (instead of snapping in), so now it looks really smooth.

4. Added the ability to specify 1 to 4 hot corners. (If, say, you have your taskbar vertical on the left of your screen, a hot corner both top and bottom left can be useful. But you can make all 4 hot if you want.)

5. Added the ability to specify the screen resolution. As installed, this is automatic, but TVs used as monitors don't properly report the screen resolution, so you can now input it manually if necessary.