Free and open source. A complete taskbar on your second and third monitor: pinned apps, window titles, volume, clock and show desktop.
Windows 11 gives secondary monitors a stripped-down taskbar: no system tray, no volume icon, and pinned apps only if you also let every monitor show every open window. MultiTaskbar replaces those secondary taskbars with a complete one:
- Start button and your pinned apps, in the same order as your main taskbar
- Only the windows on that monitor, so a window never shows up on every bar
- Window titles, following Windows' "Combine taskbar buttons and hide labels" setting (icons only when set to Always)
- The right-click menu of the real taskbar: the files the app opened lately, its windows, and Explorer's own entries, including Run as administrator, Properties and Unpin from taskbar
- Live window previews on hover, drawn by the desktop compositor, as on the real taskbar
- Volume: click for a slider, scroll to change, middle-click to mute
- Clock and date with a calendar when you click them, and Show desktop in the corner
- Light and dark theme and your accent color, picked up from Windows
- Hides itself when an app goes full screen
- A tray icon on the main taskbar, so the app can be reached even if a bar does not appear
- Scales to each monitor's DPI, so a 4K screen next to a 1080p one both look right
Your main monitor's taskbar is not touched. A Windows taskbar on another monitor is hidden only while a MultiTaskbar bar is actually up on that same monitor, and comes back the moment it is not: on exit, on a crash, and even if the process is killed, because a second, idle copy of the program watches the first and restores the taskbars if it ends without doing so.
- Download
MultiTaskbar.exefrom the latest release. - Put it in a folder where it can stay, for example
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\MultiTaskbar. - Run it. It asks once whether to start automatically when you sign in.
To change that later, right-click an empty spot on a MultiTaskbar bar and toggle Start with Windows. If you move the exe, run it once from the new place and the startup entry follows it.
MultiTaskbar asks GitHub once a day whether a newer release exists. When there is one, the right-click menu offers Update to … and restart; nothing is downloaded or installed until you choose it. The download is checked against the SHA-256 published with the release.
The check sends no data beyond the request itself, and Check for updates automatically in the
same menu turns it off. MultiTaskbar.exe --update updates the exe in place without any UI, for
scripted deployments.
Windows SmartScreen may warn about the download because the exe is not code-signed. Choose More info → Run anyway, or build it yourself (below).
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Hover an app | Live previews of its windows; click one to switch, middle-click to close it |
| Click an app | Switch to it, minimize it, or cycle through its windows |
| Shift+click or middle-click an app | Open a new window |
| Right-click an app | Recent files, window list, the shell's own menu (Run as administrator, Properties, Unpin), close |
| Right-click an empty spot | Task Manager, Start with Windows, updates, Exit |
| Click the clock | A calendar; scroll or use the arrows for other months, right-click for date & time settings |
| Click the tray icon | The same settings, plus Open file location and Uninstall |
To quit, right-click an empty spot on the bar, or the tray icon, and choose Exit MultiTaskbar.
No Visual Studio or .NET SDK needed. It uses the C# compiler that comes with Windows:
build.cmdThe result is bin\MultiTaskbar.exe. The whole app is a single file, src\MultiTaskbar.cs.
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, with more than one monitor. .NET Framework 4.x is part of Windows.
Why doesn't Windows 11 do this? Its secondary taskbars are a separate, reduced version of the real one. The system tray, the clock's calendar flyout and the volume flyout live only on the main taskbar, and the pinned-apps setting is all-or-nothing.
Does it replace my main taskbar? No. The main monitor is untouched. MultiTaskbar hides the stripped-down Windows taskbars on the other monitors while it runs and brings them back when it exits.
How is it different from DisplayFusion or Actual Multiple Monitors? Those are paid, feature-rich suites that also add multi-monitor taskbars. MultiTaskbar does one thing, is free, open source, and is a single 46 KB exe with no installer, background service or telemetry.
Does it work on Windows 10? Yes, though Windows 10's own multi-monitor taskbar is already closer to complete, so there is less to gain.
Can I change the order of the pinned apps? Pin and unpin on your main taskbar as usual; MultiTaskbar follows it within a few seconds.
Pick Uninstall MultiTaskbar from the tray menu, or find MultiTaskbar in Settings > Apps >
Installed apps, or run MultiTaskbar.exe --uninstall. It brings the Windows taskbars back,
removes the startup entry, its settings and its log, and deletes the exe. Installed through winget
instead? Then winget uninstall MultiTaskbar does it.
- The system tray itself stays on the main monitor. MultiTaskbar shows volume, clock and show desktop, not the full tray.
- Windows on other virtual desktops are not listed, matching the real taskbar.
- If your Windows taskbar auto-hides, or sits on the top or a side of the screen (Windows 10), MultiTaskbar still draws along the bottom and does not reserve screen space of its own.