📌 Taskbar Groups — Fluent

Group your shortcuts into a single taskbar icon. A modern WPF / .NET 8 rewrite of Taskbar Groups, with a Fluent (WinUI 3-style) interface.

🌍 Español · English

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✨ What it does

Taskbar Groups turns a folder-worth of apps into one taskbar button. Click it and a small flyout pops up with every app in the group — so your taskbar stays tidy and everything you need is one click away.

• 🧩 Add any installed app — one searchable list of everything installed (desktop and Microsoft Store apps), read straight from the Windows shell app catalog. No hunting for the right .exe; a Browse… button covers anything unlisted.
• 🖼️ Correct icons, always — icons come from the same shell pipeline the Start Menu uses (high-res, transparent, UWP and desktop alike). When Windows can't resolve one — some Squirrel/Electron apps like Obsidian or Brave — it falls back to the app's own executable icon, so you never get a blank placeholder.
• 🎨 Custom group icons — upload any image and crop & zoom it in the built-in editor, or…
• 😀 …pick a colour emoji — hit Emoji and choose one as the group icon, rendered crisp and centred. No image needed.
• 📌 Pin to the taskbar — each group becomes a pinned button; clicking it opens the flyout with your apps.
• 🔄 Live taskbar updates — change a pinned group's icon and the taskbar button refreshes itself, with a clean shell restart that won't disturb your other pinned icons.
• 📁 Apps and folders in the same group.
• 🌍 Follows your Windows look — light/dark theme and accent colour, plus the interface language (English or Spanish) are picked up from your system automatically. Override the language with the TBG_LANG variable.
• ⬇️ One-click installer + automatic updates — install with a double-click; the app checks for new versions on launch and updates itself when you say so.

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📸 Screenshots

Your groups at a glance. Each card is a group you can pin, edit or delete; the icon can be an image or an emoji.

Group editor	App picker	Emoji picker
Name it, set an icon, and add apps or folders.	Every installed app, searchable, with the right icon.	Pick a colour emoji as the group icon.

Click the pinned group on your taskbar and its apps appear in a flyout.

💡 Images on GitHub are clickable — open any screenshot to zoom in.

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⬇️ Download & install

1. Click the Download button above — or this direct link: download the installer.
2. Run the downloaded TaskbarGroupsFluent-Setup.exe. It installs per-user (no admin needed) and, if you don't already have the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime, downloads and installs it for you.
3. Launch Taskbar Groups from the Start Menu. Done!

Prefer to see all versions and files? They're on the Releases page.

Windows may show an "unknown publisher" warning (the app isn't signed with a paid certificate yet). Click More info → Run anyway.

🔄 Automatic updates

On launch, Taskbar Groups checks GitHub for a newer version. If there is one, it offers to update — one click downloads and installs it, then reopens the app. No manual re-downloading.

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🚀 How to use it

1. Click Add group and give it a name and an icon (upload & crop an image, or hit Emoji).
2. Add shortcuts with App (pick any installed app from the searchable list, or Browse…) or Folder.
3. Click Save group.
4. On the group's card, click Pin to taskbar and follow the 3 steps (right-click the highlighted shortcut → Show more options → Pin to taskbar). Windows 11 blocks fully automatic pinning, so this last step is yours to confirm.
5. Click the pinned icon to open the flyout with your apps.

The interface is English or Spanish depending on your Windows display language. Force it with the TBG_LANG=en / TBG_LANG=es environment variable.

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🛠️ Building from source

Requires the .NET 8 SDK.

git clone https://github.com/Mun1to/TaskbarGroupsFluent.git
cd TaskbarGroupsFluent
dotnet build TaskbarGroupsFluent.sln -c Release

Run the TaskbarGroups.App project. To produce a distributable build:

dotnet publish src/TaskbarGroups.App -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false -o dist/TaskbarGroupsFluent
dotnet publish src/TaskbarGroups.Background -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false -o dist/TaskbarGroupsFluent/Background

The installer is built with Inno Setup from installer/TaskbarGroupsFluent.iss.

🧱 How it works

Project	Role
TaskbarGroups.Core	UI-agnostic logic: data model, shell AppsFolder catalog + icon pipeline, shell interop, paths
TaskbarGroups.App	Fluent editor — main window, group editor, app & emoji pickers, icon crop editor, updater
TaskbarGroups.Background	The borderless flyout shown above the taskbar

The app deploys the background flyout next to itself; a pinned shortcut launches it with the group name as its argument.

🙏 Credits

Built on the work of:

• tjackenpacken/taskbar-groups — the original app.
• PikeNote/taskbar-groups-pike-beta — community fork whose structure this rewrite started from.
• WPF-UI — the Fluent control library · SkiaSharp — colour-emoji rendering.

📜 License

MIT, same as the projects above.