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In Windows 10, the active window is represented on the taskbar by a very subtle shade affect (see pic). Is there a setting or registry hack that would make it more obvious?

(I keep trying to switch to the browser window I'm already in, which is confusing)

Pic: Can you tell which window is active? lol

enter image description here

codeulike
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    "Can you tell which window is active?" The one after Firefox :) – DavidPostill Apr 23 '22 at 12:57
  • Make sure you have a good color scheme. It is very obvious on my Windows 10 VM and better again in Windows 11. – John Apr 23 '22 at 13:03
  • Try in this post to do the registry changes described under "How to Change the Windows 10 Taskbar Color Without Activation", then reboot. Remember the old values so you may undo these changes. – harrymc Apr 23 '22 at 20:04
  • @John in older versions of windows there was fine grained control over what colours were used where but apparently not in Windows 10. What settings do you have? I tried "Show accent colour on taskbar' but it still doesn't emphasise the active window – codeulike Apr 23 '22 at 21:49
  • I have a Windows 10 virtual machine here. Classic theme, Windows Accent Colors set and it is easy to see the active App. – John Apr 23 '22 at 22:01
  • @John I dont seem to have Classic Theme, and its not in the store – codeulike Apr 25 '22 at 09:32
  • I meant I just use a plain color background and accent colors on the task bar and window headers. I think the Accent Colors are the most important to see the icon underlining clearly. – John Apr 25 '22 at 12:10
  • I don't know of a real solution but in the past when I had something like that I played around with the monitor color settings like brightness and it helped. Not the Windows settings, the settings on the monitor itself. – User42 Apr 25 '22 at 17:08
  • My Sceptre monitor has backlighting LEDs along the bottom edge of the screen, which causes variations in brightness in the taskbar that are greater than the subtle Windows brightness difference for the active window. Ugh! – Dave Burton Aug 11 '23 at 17:05

3 Answers3

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I use Classic Start Menu for ages now. It's part of Classic Shell and has an option to set the taskbar colour, independent of any system colours. So I can set it to something lighter (or darker, depending on the colour scheme) to make the active window button stand out more.

Settings -> "Show all settings" checked -> Taskbar (Tab) -> Customize Taskbar checked -> Taskbar color

Classic Shell Homepage
contains Classic Start Menu and Classic Explorer

Xan-Kun Clark-Davis
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AccentPaletteTool or Winaero Tweaker can be tried, but I haven't checked whether that provides a full solution. A full solution without using a tool is this:

  • Go to Settings → Personalization → Colors. Enable "show color on Start, taskbar and action center". (If it is greyed out, change from the light mode to the dark mode. You can still customize most colors to be light or whatever you want.)
  • Open the Registry Editor
  • Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Accent\AccentPalette
  • Set the entries 10,11,12 of AccentPalette to the web color you want. (If taskbar transparency is enabled, then maybe other entries than 10,11,12 should be changed.) (Some entries were explained in a discussion on Reddit here.)
  • To solve the problem that "it affects many places": set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize\ColorPrevalence to the value 2

Result: screenshot

root
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To avoid changing theme and to make active window more obvious on the taskbar, I wrote my own "power tool" application and an ahk script.

base on those two facts:

  1. sometimes, an win32 window could be shown on top of the taskbar (example fullscreen window).
  2. in ahk, you can iterate over taskbar icons (getting names、icon positions) through accessibility interface acccording to this post

just show a semi-transparent (WS_EX_LAYERD | WS_EX_TRANSPARENT) . Then when ahk script detects a different window is activated, get the new window title, compare with those in the taskbar, and move the window to cover the corresponding position on taskbar (SetWindowPos...HWND_TOPMOST) .

github link containing the ahk script and the native tool window application : https://github.com/appxmod/PowerTools

before and after :

demo

KnIfER
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