Taskbar App Memory

A Windhawk mod for the Windows 11 taskbar: the apps you choose go back to their place when they reopen, instead of to the end.

On the Windows 11 taskbar, an app that isn't pinned loses its place when you close it. Arrange your buttons just so, close an app, open it again, and its button is at the end. The same happens after a restart: the apps come back in whatever order they happen to start. This mod remembers where the apps you tick were, and puts their buttons back there.

What it does

• Choose the apps: right-click an empty part of the taskbar, open Remember positions (Lembrar posições on a Portuguese Windows), and tick the apps whose place should be kept. It lists the open apps that aren't pinned (pinned apps stay where Windows puts them anyway), then the ticked apps that are closed or pinned since, so you can untick those too. In the mod's settings you can have every app remembered instead; the submenu then only says so.
• Arrange the buttons by dragging them, as usual. The mod remembers where you leave the ticked apps.
• Close a ticked app and open it later, even after restarting the computer: its button goes back between the same neighbours it had.
• The other apps go where Windows puts them, as usual. The mod keeps track of where they are, since the ticked apps are placed next to them.
• Pinned apps stay where Windows puts them. The mod never moves them, it only uses them as landmarks: a ticked app you left between two pinned apps goes back between them.

How the place is chosen

The mod keeps one list of every app it has seen on the taskbar, in the order they were last seen, closed apps included. When a ticked app opens, its button goes right after the nearest app that comes before it in that list and is on the taskbar now. When none of those are there, it goes in front of the apps on the taskbar that the list has.

So the order you arrange is kept whatever order the apps open in, which is what makes it survive a restart: the apps that start with Windows each go to their place as they appear. A ticked app's place is certain next to pinned apps and other ticked apps; next to apps that aren't ticked it can shift, since those go wherever Windows puts them.

Only what happens while the mod is running is learned. Ticked apps rearranged while it's disabled go back to their old places when they reopen; drag them with the mod on to change that. Pinned apps are the exception: when their order changes without a drag (another program moving a pin, or pins moved while the mod was off), the mod follows it from the next time a button opens or is dragged. Until then, an app next to the pin that moved can come back on its other side if it closes first, or if Explorer restarts (adding a separator with Taskbar Icon Separators is one such change).

How it works

Each taskbar keeps its buttons in a list of button groups, one per app, in the order they're shown. When an app gets a button, taskbar.dll (CTaskListWnd::_CreateTBGroup) adds its group at the end of that list with DPA_InsertPtr; when you drag one, CTaskListWnd::TryMoveGroup puts it back at its new index the same way. The mod hooks DPA_InsertPtr while either of those runs:

• a ticked app's group goes in at the index the remembered order gives, instead of the end. That index is the one the taskbar's XAML view is then told about, so the button simply appears in its place, with no jump;
• after a drag, the order learns where the app now is.

The submenu is added the way the Taskbar Restart Explorer and Taskbar Icon Separators mods add their items to that menu: while Taskbar.View.dll builds it (ContextMenus::ShowTaskbarSettingsContextMenu), in front of the first item it appends. To list the apps, the mod finds each taskbar's list in its CTaskListWnd as the field that points at a list of button groups, checking every pointer before following it. Everything else comes from Microsoft's public symbols, which Windhawk downloads.

Worth knowing

• Apps are told apart by their App ID, the identity Windows uses to put windows under one button. An app that changes it is a new app to the mod: a browser's new profile, or a portable app moved to another folder.
• A ticked app you unpin keeps the place it had among the pinned apps: when it opens again, it goes there (with All apps, every app does). Drag it once to put it somewhere else. An app that isn't ticked opens at the end, like any other.
• Only the order of the buttons is kept, not the order of the windows inside one button.
• With several monitors there is one list for all the taskbars, and each taskbar places an app relative to the apps it shows. With "Show my taskbar apps on: All taskbars" (the default), Windows keeps the taskbars in the same order after each drag. Not after pinning an app from Start, though: the new pin goes to the end of the main taskbar but among the pinned apps on the others, and until the next drag an app next to it there can come back on its other side. With the two "taskbar where window is open" settings, an app can have a button on two taskbars but has one place in the list, so arrange the apps on the main taskbar (ticking an app shown only on another monitor takes its place from that monitor, which can put it on the other side of a pinned app on the main taskbar); and on the other taskbars, where the pinned apps aren't shown, a pinned app's button is left where Windows puts it.
• Switching virtual desktops takes buttons off the taskbar and puts them back; the ticked ones come back in the remembered order.
• With the Taskbar Grouping mod, which can give each window a button of its own, a ticked app's first button goes back to its place, and the buttons of its other windows go where Taskbar Grouping's settings say. Their places aren't remembered: an app that sat right next to another app's extra-window buttons can come back on their far side, and dropping an app between another app and that app's extra windows isn't kept. When the first window closes, Taskbar Grouping passes its identity on to another of the app's windows, and that window's button becomes the app's place.
• If the submenu doesn't appear (the mod's log says "No menu"), choose All apps in the settings, or, with the mod disabled, change the - to r on the app's line in order.txt.

Where the list is kept

The list is order.txt, in the mod's storage folder, in a folder named after your account's SID. In a default Windhawk install that's %ProgramData%\Windhawk\Engine\ModsWritable\mod-storage\taskbar-app-memory\<your SID>\ (local@taskbar-app-memory for a mod compiled in Windhawk's editor); with Windhawk's logging on, the mod writes the exact path to the log when it starts ("Order file: ...").

Windhawk's storage is shared by every account on the computer, so each account gets a folder of its own, named after its SID (whoami /user shows it), which the mod creates readable only by that account and the administrators.

The file is read when the mod starts and rewritten while it runs. To reset or edit it, disable the mod, delete or edit the file, then enable the mod again. Its first line is taskbar-app-memory v1, and each line after it is one app, in order, with tabs between: the day it was last seen, r if it's ticked or - if not, its App ID, and its name. A file the mod can't read is moved aside as order.txt.<date>-<time>.bad; one it can only read in part is copied there, then rewritten with the lines it could read. Uninstalling the mod deletes the folder. Past 256 apps, the ones not seen for the longest time are forgotten, ticked ones last.

Install

1. Install Windhawk.
2. Create a new mod, paste taskbar-app-memory.wh.cpp, compile it.
3. Right-click an empty part of the taskbar, open Remember positions, and tick the apps.

Windows 11 with its own taskbar, tested on 25H2 (build 26200) with four monitors. With the old taskbar that ExplorerPatcher or StartAllBack bring back, the mod does nothing. On 21H2, and on 22H2 without recent updates, buttons may still open at the end.

Coming from Taskbar Remember Positions

Versions 0.1.0 and 0.2.0, published only here, were called Taskbar Remember Positions (taskbar-remember-positions). Windhawk sees the new name as a different mod, with a storage folder of its own, so install this one and remove the old one; tick the apps again in the new one. A 0.2.0 list can be carried over by hand: with both mods disabled, copy its order.txt into the new mod's folder and change the first line to taskbar-app-memory v1 (the rest of the format is the same).

Version 0.1.0 remembered every app; to keep that behaviour, choose All apps in the mod's settings.

Build check

compilar.sh compiles the mod with Windhawk's own compiler and flags, for every target Windhawk builds it for (x64 and ARM64), without installing anything, to catch errors and warnings:

sh compilar.sh taskbar-app-memory.wh.cpp

License

MIT, see LICENSE.