How to Hide the Windows 11 Taskbar (Until You Need It)
The Windows 11 taskbar occupies a thick line on the screen. Most people don’t mind, but there are good reasons to want it to stop. You might want to take advantage of that little extra screen real estate or focus more fully on your current task without seeing the time, widgets, or other app icons.
Whatever your reason, hiding the taskbar isn’t that hard. There’s an easy way to do this built right into Windows, or you can use a third-party app if you want to prevent the taskbar from randomly appearing when you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen.
Hide the taskbar using Windows Settings
To hide the taskbar using Windows’ built-in settings, simply right-click an empty spot on the taskbar, then select Taskbar Settings . Scroll down until you see “Taskbar Behavior” and click it. Check the “Automatically hide the taskbar” checkbox.
This will hide the Windows taskbar, with one exception: it will appear if you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen.
Hide the Windows taskbar completely
For most people the above will work perfectly, but not for everyone. For example, this can be annoying if the app you’re using has buttons at the bottom of the screen that you need to access regularly. It’s actually too easy to bring up the taskbar and close whatever it is you’re trying to click.
This is where Buttery Taskbar comes to the rescue. Launch this application and the taskbar will disappear. It will no longer appear if you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen, meaning it will never accidentally cover whatever you’re working on. However, it hasn’t gone away: you can press the Windows key to open the Start menu, which will also open the taskbar, or you can move the mouse to the bottom of the screen and scroll up using the scroll wheel.
There is an icon in the taskbar that you can use to configure the scrolling option and exit the application. I prefer to launch this app specifically when I want to work without the taskbar, but you can also set it to launch using the built-in Windows Task Scheduler if you prefer. Simply open the utility, which you can find in the Start menu, and create a new task. Select “When I log in” as the trigger; For the action, select “Run a program” and point it at Buttery Smooth. Make sure that the “Run with highest privileges” checkbox is selected on the “Oil” tab.
From here you can ignore the taskbar until you want to use it, which I like. This is especially useful if you already use PowerToys Run to launch software instead of the Start menu.