- A new menu bar could be introduced in Windows 11
- This would come in the form of an optional dock for the command palette in PowerToys.
- This would contain shortcuts to your favorite tools, as well as system monitoring information, but it’s just a concept for now.
Windows 11 may not let you move the taskbar to the top of the screen, but it could give you a top menu bar as a sort of substitute for that ability, and it’s an idea I like – but it’s proving somewhat controversial.
Windows Central highlighted this potential new development, and I should clarify upfront that this is a proposed addition for 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 Command Palette, which is one of PowerToys’ tools – it’s essentially a launcher for Windows 11. (Command Palette will eventually take over from the Run utility, although it’s still a work in progress at the moment).
This dock takes the form of a menu bar that can be located at the top (or sides, or even bottom) of the Windows 11 desktop environment. It can hold information about your system – like a small display for CPU usage or internet speeds – as well as allow you to pin your favorite PowerToys features and utilities to the bar.
As usual with PowerToys, if you really want to dig deeper into this feature, there will be all sorts of customization tricks possible, including changing the appearance of the dock with a different background, or using a light or dark theme.
Analysis: taskbar replacement
So it’s a PowerToys-focused taskbar alternative that you can deploy anywhere, as shown, giving you faster and more convenient access to these utilities, along with a variety of features, as well as at-a-glance displays for system information.
I like the idea and would appreciate this addition to PowerToys, although some people aren’t too happy with the idea of losing desktop space to a second bar (with the taskbar already at the bottom of the screen, of course). This is fair enough, and you don’t have to activate the command palette dock if you don’t want to. (Assuming it ever gets made, of course – we don’t know if this project has any progress yet, it’s just a concept at the moment).
Perhaps the dock could work better if the bar only appeared visible if you hovered 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 prefer it to be implemented as a complete replacement for the taskbar. This means you can add items from the Windows 11 taskbar as “widgets” to that dock, then hide the taskbar permanently, using that instead (and placing it wherever you want, of course). In reality, though, I don’t see that happening – PowerToys isn’t designed to replace Windows 11 features, it’s an add-on pack of extras.
Given that Microsoft seems to have turned over a new leaf in terms of improving Windows 11 – promising to squash bugs and improve performance levels and overall responsiveness – perhaps this new attitude could just include giving us long-awaited capabilities like moving the taskbar, anyway? I doubt it, given how far we’ve come with this feature remaining banned from Microsoft’s latest operating system, but I guess you never know.
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