Powertoys: Taskbar Zone / in center

[GummiGerken]

A new zone to center the taskbar and give it a maximum width.

i just recently bought a 49 inch monitor, and the taskbar stretches the entire way across. It would be nice to be able to confine the taskbar to a zone a little bit more like a dock. Also, if the Windows search that pops up could optionally be centered on the screen the way MacOS centers search results, that would be a nice bonus. I was looking through issues and I realize both of these features are very similar to bugs that have been fixed.

Thank you for your consideration.

[Tracked in #6611]

[enricogior]

Hi @GummiGerken
it's funny how something that was fixed as a bug may actually be useful in some scenarios.
I'm not sure if moving/resizing the taskbar and the search popup may be done in a robust/reliable manner but thanks for the suggestion, since it definitely makes sense on very large screens.

[tomgehrke]

Also just got a 49" monitor and didn't realize this was something I wanted until I read it. 🤣

[mrvonwyl]

I am a 49" monitor user as well. Personally I do not mind if the taskbar is full width. Or maybe I even like it better that way, because there is a fixed border at the bottom stretching over the whole width. However I like the application icons to be centered (currently I use https://github.com/mdhiggins/CenterTaskbar to achieve that).

I am not sure if it should be part of fancy zone or a separate feature. One solution might be, that you simply could add margins left and right to the taskbar, either with these margins filled with the same background color, or to free the space for windows to reside there.

[myusrn]

This centered taskbar app icons request i think also aligns with the https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/795 request for a keyboard shortcut to center active window into narrow fast reading format on modern ultra wide 21:9 and super ultra wide 32:9 aspect ratio displays as well as really large wide screen 16:9 setups.

For centering task bar icons I'm also using https://github.com/mdhiggins/CenterTaskbar and it does the job without any of the advanced resizing animation configuration options of other solutions.

It doesn't appear that current center taskbar icons solutions provide setting that also takes into account pulling in the left side start button/search box/cortana/task view and right side system tray / notification area components of task bar if that is what someone wants as well. This would seem to make a lot of sense on ultra 21:9 and super ultra wide 32:9 monitors to avoid cranking head and/or eyeballs always to the far off left and right when needing to view or interact with those components.

[enricogior]

Tracked in https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6611

[acseven]

For reference of anyone with the programming skills mentioned, from the author of https://github.com/mdhiggins/CenterTaskbar:

I like the idea of this being a feature of PowerToys @acseven but unfortunately it looks like PowerToys is a C++ app and this is a C# app. Someone would need to port the code over to C++ before you could submit a PR to Microsoft.