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Is there a way to hide the Windows taskbar using Python? If not- is there a way to disable or to re-size and lock it using the registry?

Eddy Freddy
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unice
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2 Answers2

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Microsoft support document KB186119 demonstrates how to hide the taskbar using Visual Basic. Here's a ctypes version for Python, but using ShowWindow instead of SetWindowPos:

import ctypes
from ctypes import wintypes

user32 = ctypes.WinDLL("user32")

SW_HIDE = 0
SW_SHOW = 5

user32.FindWindowW.restype = wintypes.HWND
user32.FindWindowW.argtypes = (
    wintypes.LPCWSTR, # lpClassName
    wintypes.LPCWSTR) # lpWindowName

user32.ShowWindow.argtypes = (
    wintypes.HWND, # hWnd
    ctypes.c_int)  # nCmdShow

def hide_taskbar():
    hWnd = user32.FindWindowW(u"Shell_traywnd", None)
    user32.ShowWindow(hWnd, SW_HIDE)

def unhide_taskbar():
    hWnd = user32.FindWindowW(u"Shell_traywnd", None)
    user32.ShowWindow(hWnd, SW_SHOW)
Eryk Sun
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    The most beautiful thing about this code is that it continues to work up to Windows 10. – IronManMark20 Aug 01 '15 at 00:17
  • Is there a possibility to also hide the start button? Right now it still stays. – Henrik Sep 24 '15 at 15:45
  • @Henrik, for older versions of Windows, try finding the start button or orb using FindWindowEx, as I did in [this answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/16651313/205580). To clarify, in Windows 10 hiding the taskbar also hides the start button. – Eryk Sun Sep 24 '15 at 17:18
  • Thanks a lot. really appreciate it. works prefectly on windows 10 – Hossein Jun 22 '20 at 02:04
1

Just to add to @eryksun answer, if you try this in windows 7 you would still get to see the start button... I did i little tweek in his code to

1) Hide the start button (with the hWnd_btn_start = user32.FindWindowW(u"Button", 'Start') )

2) Now you can pass Hide (default behaviour) or Show to the command line to show or hide the taskbar.

import ctypes
import sys

from ctypes import wintypes

user32 = ctypes.WinDLL("user32")

SW_HIDE = 0
SW_SHOW = 5

HIDE = True;

for idx,item in enumerate(sys.argv):
    print(idx, item);
    if (idx == 1 and item.upper() == 'SHOW'):
        HIDE = False;

#HIDE = sys.argv[1] = 'HIDE' ? True : False;


user32.FindWindowW.restype = wintypes.HWND
user32.FindWindowW.argtypes = (
    wintypes.LPCWSTR, # lpClassName
    wintypes.LPCWSTR) # lpWindowName

user32.ShowWindow.argtypes = (
    wintypes.HWND, # hWnd
    ctypes.c_int)  # nCmdShow

def hide_taskbar():
    hWnd = user32.FindWindowW(u"Shell_traywnd", None)
    user32.ShowWindow(hWnd, SW_HIDE)

    hWnd_btn_start = user32.FindWindowW(u"Button", 'Start')
    user32.ShowWindow(hWnd_btn_start, SW_HIDE)

def unhide_taskbar():
    hWnd = user32.FindWindowW(u"Shell_traywnd", None)
    user32.ShowWindow(hWnd, SW_SHOW)

if (HIDE):
    hide_taskbar();
else:
    unhide_taskbar();

Usage: To show the taskbar python hideTaskBar.py Show To hide the taskbar python hideTaskBar.py Hide

Again, many thanks to @eryksun

Samuel Aiala Ferreira
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