I can’t even begin to count how many people have become addicted to closing tabs in their browser using the middle mouse button. If you’re one of those people I’m here to tell you that you can carry that feature outside of your browser and onto the Windows Taskbar!
One of my favorite free apps, Taskbar Shuffle, has had this feature for quite some time now. It’s enabled by default, but I didn’t realize it came with this it until about a month ago. With it you can middle-click on any Taskbar button to quickly close the program! Now how cool is that?
For those of you not familiar with Taskbar Shuffle it is well known for its ability to reorder the items in your Taskbar using a simple drag-and-drop motion. One of the more recent releases also made it possible to rearrange icons in your System Tray, and when you put all of this together you get one amazingly small, free, and powerful application.
There are two versions of Taskbar Shuffle available, one that is bundled with an installer for easy setup, and another that includes only the files critical for running the app. The latter is great for people who want to run this from a USB drive, or just don’t want to install yet another program on their computer!
Sweet. I’ve been using task bar shuffle for months and I wasn’t aware of this either.
Thx.
A great find in addition to your tip of using middle click on laptops this one is great too. I have though got a wireless mouse now and this application seems to fit right in.
That’s pretty awesome because I usually right click, shift my mouse up a fraction and right click again. It’s pretty quick to do but some apps (like PuTTy) have a link to the about dialogue at the bottom of their taskbar context menu.
Unfortunately Taskbar Shuffle isn’t ready for 64-bit yet. But when it is I’ll be sure to use this!
Glad to see I wasn’t the only one who overlooked this feature!
I’m sure it will eventually come, but many apps are still lagging behind the 64-bit era.
However, the middle click feature does not work if you are using a Logitech mouse and have it set for middle click to be a double click (which opens programs).