windows-11-taskbar-styling-guide documents Windhawk mod settings

A settings reference, not a tool

The repository description is a collection of commonly requested taskbar styling customizations for Windows 11, and the README makes the dependency explicit: it is intended to be used with the Windows 11 Taskbar Styler Windhawk mod. That framing tells you what this is. There is no program here, no build step, no package to install. The top level of the tree confirms it, holding only an Assets/ directory, the README and a Themes/ directory. What the guide provides is a catalogue of the settings the mod exposes, explained in one place, so that a person configuring the mod does not have to rediscover each option name and its effect. For a project that is mostly prose, the table of contents is the honest summary of the scope. It runs from general options such as taskbar size, background and border, through the task list with the start button image, button size, corner radius, labels and the running indicator, into the notification area with tray overflow background, icon size and spacing, hiding the network, volume and notification bell icons, the chevron width and the clock, and then out to Alt+Tab, task view and the volume popup, followed by sections on transforms and on the color options.

The setup is a mod install, not a code change

Getting to the point where the guide is useful takes four steps, and the README gives them in order. You download Windhawk from windhawk.net and install it, you go to Mods in the upper right menu, you find and install the Windows 11 Taskbar Styler mod, and then you open the mod's Settings tab and adjust the styles according to your preferences. The guide's value sits in that last step, where the number of knobs and their exact names become hard to hold in your head. The README also notes that some customizations are best adjusted with other Windhawk mods and that links to those mods are provided where applicable, which matters because the mod ecosystem is where the workarounds live rather than in any single tool. There is a companion series from the same author for the start menu and the notification centre, and the README cross references both, so the three guides together cover the pieces of the Windows 11 shell that people most often want to change. Windhawk itself is a separate project and the guide does not explain how it works internally.

Beyond the taskbar: Alt+Tab, task view and the volume popup

A section of the guide is worth singling out, because it shows the mod reaches further than the taskbar. As of version 1.5 of Windows 11 Taskbar Styler, the components that can be styled along with the taskbar are Alt+Tab, task view under Win+Tab, the volume popup, the language popup and the snap layout popups. Each of those has its own entries in the guide. The Alt+Tab section covers its background, the task view section covers its background and how to hide virtual desktops, and the volume popup section covers slider thickness. Hiding the entire system tray, hiding the show desktop button and giving the Copilot button a custom image are also documented. The reason this matters is that a taskbar-only styling tool would leave the Alt+Tab switcher, which is arguably the most visible element on the screen during a multi window workflow, looking like the stock Windows one. Whether you want that depends on taste, but the capability is there and it is versioned, which is the point to remember.

Transforms and colors are where the interesting settings live

The two sections at the end of the guide are the least obvious and probably the most used, because they are the ones that turn a stock taskbar into something specific. The transforms section covers translate, rotate, scale, skew, and a set of other properties and attributes, which together amount to a general purpose placement and geometry layer over the shell elements. The colors section is longer still, and it lists a solid color, accent colors, a transparent color, and then the system materials as colors: the acrylic effect, the WindhawkBlur effect and the mica effect, followed by a gradient as color and an image as color. That last group is the reason people install this mod at all, because a background image or a gradient behind the taskbar is not something the stock Windows 11 settings offer. The order of the table of contents is roughly a workflow, going from the biggest surface, the taskbar background, to the smallest, the chevron icon width and the clock.

Nineteen themes, and the two directories that hold them

Themes are described as collections of styles that can be imported into the Windows 11 Taskbar Styler mod, and the Themes/ directory holds one folder per theme with its own README and a screenshot. The catalogue in the README is long enough to be worth scanning rather than reading: TranslucentTaskbar, DockLike, SimplyTransparent, Squircle, Matter, WinXP, Bubbles, RosePine, WinVista, CleanSlate, Lucent, SunValley with a separate legacy SunValley entry, BottomDensy, TaskbarXII, xdark, Windows7, Aeris, Plasma and WindowGlass. Several of these are recreations of a previous Windows release, which is the most popular reason to use a taskbar styler at all. The legacy naming, with SunValley appearing both under its own name and under the 21996Taskbar folder, suggests the collection grew out of community themes rather than being designed as a coherent set. Because a theme is just imported settings rather than an installed component, trying one is cheap and reverting is a matter of importing a different set.

Finding the right target when a setting is not in the guide

There is a practical gap in any guide of this kind, and this one points at the tool for closing it. The Finding targets section links to how to find targets using UWPSpy, hosted in the FWFU repository, and that is the answer to the most common question a user of this guide will have, which is what the internal name of the element they want to change is called. Styling mods work by name, so a customisation that does not appear in the catalogue usually means the target has a different name than you expected, and UWPSpy is how you discover the actual name to put into the settings. The Missing customizations section then closes the loop the other way, asking you to open an issue if the customization you want is not listed. The Contributing section invites pull requests for a styling customization or a theme. Between the three, the guide has a defined process: find the target name, request what is missing, contribute what you have. What the repository does not do is document how the mod hooks into Windows, so a guide reader ends up depending on Windhawk's own documentation for the mechanism.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this guide if you run Windows 11 and want to restyle the taskbar, the Alt+Tab switcher, the task view or the volume popup through Windhawk rather than by patching the shell yourself, and if you are comfortable with a tool that injects into system processes. Do not adopt it as documentation for a supported configuration path, since the whole approach depends on a community mod hooking Windows internals. Verify first that the guide matches the version of the Taskbar Styler mod you have installed, since the supported component list is tied to version 1.5, and check the issue tracker for your particular customization before assuming the mod simply cannot do it.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. ramensoftware/windows-11-taskbar-styling-guide on GitHub
3. README
4. Releases