Adaptive Taskbar is a lightweight desktop app that automatically switches between the big or small Windows taskbar depending on the current main screen size.
This is how a regular taskbar looks like in a big monitor:
However when you switch to a smaller monitor (like when disconnecting the external screen of your laptop), if there is not enough room for all your pinned icons, the following ugly behavior will happen by default:
With Adaptive Taskbar installed, your taskbar will automatically be switched to the small variant so that you can get rid of the ugly two line scrollable taskbar and see this instead:
Adaptive Taskbar works on the background by automatically changing Windows' taskbar size setting when you connect or disconnect your external screen, so you don't have to.
Adaptive Taskbar has been developed and tested for Windows 10, but it should be compatible with Windows 7/8/10.
To install Adaptive Taskbar, please download and run the latest Setup.exe file from the latest release.
A dialog box will confirm the successful installation, and from that point the app will be running in the background. It will also automatically start on Windows startup just after you log in.
If you want, you can test that Adaptive Taskbar is working by changing your main screen resolution to be smaller or equal-or-bigger than the threshold (by default 1920), assuming your Windows' DPI setting is set to 100%.
You can choose the resolution threshold for the screen to be considered big by editing the AdaptiveTaskbar.exe.config file located in C:\YOUR_USER\AppData\Local\AdaptiveTaskbar\app-LAST_APP_VERSION\ after installation.
You will have to open the file with a text editor and modify the default value, 1920, to something else. The value represents the minimum horizontal resolution of the screen for it to be considered big.
Note that this resolution already takes into account Windows' DPI setting, so even if a small 13 inch screen's native resolution is 1920, if the DPI setting is set for example to 150% (which is a common thing), the actual resolution reported would be 1280, so the screen will be considered small without any modification.
As Adaptive Taskbar doesn't have any user interface, the only way to uninstall the app is via the "Apps and features" window from the Control Panel.
Adaptive Taskbar is free and open source. The source code is released under the MIT License. Contributions are very welcome. Be sure to star this project on GitHub, report bugs or suggest new ideas.
Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corp., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Adaptive Taskbar is an independent project developed by Cristian Perez and has no relationship to Windows or Microsoft Corp.