A lightweight (uses a few MB of RAM and almost no CPU) utility that makes the Windows taskbar translucent/transparent. Sadly only compatible with Windows 10, as TranslucentTB uses new Windows 10 APIs.

You can see how to use the command line in the usage file.

You can see examples of the customizations you can make in the image below:

To add TranslucentTB to startup, run the application through the command line with TranslucentTB.exe --startup to automatically add it to the Windows Registry and thus make it start automatically at subsequent boots.
It's also possible to do so via the tray icon's context menu.

TranslucentTB supports multiple taskbar states and dynamic taskbar states.

Normal taskbar states (choose one):

• Blurred, which makes the taskbar, well, blurred.
• Transparent, which makes the taskbar transparent. This will display your whole desktop background.
• Opaque, which makes your taskbar opaque.

Dynamic taskbar states (these can be used together):

• Dynamic Window States (dynamic-ws), which will make the taskbar blurred when a window is maximised on the current monitor and transparent otherwise.
• Dynamic Start Menu (dynamic-sm), which will make your taskbar match the system theme when the Start Menu is open. Does not change the Start Menu.

TranslucentTB also supports custom tints, which makes your taskbar any color you want.

You can see it in action here (Thanks @Gunny123!).

You can download the program (prebuilt executables and source snapshots) via the releases tab. If you want to get the latest bleedging edge build, you can grab it over at the AppVeyor artifacts. Note that these build may not work, or include features that are partially complete. Use at your own risk.

Some antiviruses are over eager, so they might flag this program as malicious. IT IS NOT! Over 50 thousand users have downloaded this program safely. The source is open, you can compile yourself, and I welcome any and all security reviews.

Speaking of compiling...

You have two options here: you can checkout either of the develop or master branches. It is highly recommended that you checkout master as it is stable, and develop may contain non-working code. Via git:

$ git clone -b master https://github.com/TranslucentTB/TranslucentTB.git

You can also download a zip of each branch by clicking on the Clone or Download button.

Now that you have the source, you will need Visual Studio 2015. You can get the free community edition here. Once you have that installed (make sure you have the C++ components, which are included by default). Then you can open TranslucentTB.sln, and press Ctrl+Shift+B to build the solution. The output will be in either the Release or Debug folder.

If you don't want to open Visual Studio (or install it), you can (if you haven't installed VS) install the Visual C++ Build Tools from Microsoft. Then open the Visual C++ MSBuild Command Prompt and cd into the root directory of this project, before running msbuild.

I definitly could not have done this without the help of several people: @charlesmilette, @MrAksel, @olliethepikachu, and last but certainly not least @PFCKrutonium.

If you would like to contribute, everyone is welcome to! If you are considering a major feature, need guidance, or want to talk an idea out, don't hesitate to jump on Discord or Gitter (see above), or file an issue. The main contributors are often on Discord, Gitter and Github, so we should reply fairly quickly. Also, at this time I have no plans of expanding this beyond the taskbar.

If you are looking for something that modifies more than just the taskbar, there are several programs out there.

Taskbar Tools is a similar program written in C#. Elestriel plans on expanding beyond the taskbar, to Explorer and Start last I heard.

You may have seen similar translucency abilities from programs such as Start is Back++ and Classic Shell. Both of these are great programs, but I don't need the start-replacement features, so I wrote this. Also Dynamic States allow for more customisability over the taskbar.

On build 14986, Windows Defender's real time protection sometimes seems to cause Explorer to freeze. There are two work-arounds: temporarily disable Defender when starting it, or start it via the command line. I do not know if this is fixed in build 15002.

Dynamic windows (dynamic-ws) on occaison has an issue with UWP Windows. To fix this problem, try ending the ApplicationFrameHost process (this will close open UWP programs!), and restart TranslucentTB. We are working on a solution to this. The alternative to this is to uncomment the ApplicationFrameHost line in the blacklist, but this will cause dynamic-ws to fail on UWP windows.

This program is free software under the GPL v3. Please see the COPYING file for more.