RetroBar (Enhanced Fork)

A fork of RetroBar with additional features and quality-of-life improvements.

About This Fork

This fork adds several features I wanted for my own daily use. It's not perfect and there are some bugs here and there, but it works well day-to-day and I find it to be an improvement over the original.

What's New in This Fork

• Media control buttons in window previews - Play, pause, skip tracks directly from the taskbar thumbnail (for apps that support it like Spotify, media players, etc.)
• Pinned apps open in place - When you click a pinned app, it opens where the pin is instead of creating a separate button on the right with other running programs
• Show date in the clock - Option to display the date alongside the time
• 12-hour or 24-hour clock - Choose your preferred time format
• Date format options - Switch between MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY
• Live window thumbnails - Hover over taskbar buttons to see live previews with title bar and close button
• Improved window grouping - Better support for grouping similar windows together

Requirements

• Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, or Windows 11
• .NET 6.0.2 or later desktop runtime

Features (from Original RetroBar)

• Replaces default Windows taskbar with classic layout
• Native notification area with balloon notification support
• Native task list with UWP app support and drag reordering
• Quick launch toolbar
• Start button opens modern start menu
• Show/hide clock, auto-hide taskbar
• Display on any side of screen
• Resizable with multiple row support
• Multi-monitor support
• Customizable XP-style collapsible notification area

Included Themes

• System (Classic, XP, Vista)
• Watercolor
• Windows 95-98, Me, 2000
• Windows XP: Classic, Blue, Olive Green, Silver, Royale, Royale Noir, Embedded, Zune
• Windows Longhorn Aero
• Windows Vista: Aero, Basic, Classic

More themes available on DeviantArt.

Custom Themes and Languages

Install custom themes by creating a Themes directory in %localappdata%\RetroBar and placing valid .xaml theme files there. Same applies for Languages directory.

Credits

• Original RetroBar by dremin
• Based on ManagedShell by Cairo Shell team
• Community theme creators on DeviantArt

License

Same license as the original RetroBar project.

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Technical Details

This fork includes a modified version of ManagedShell bundled directly in the repository (changes are pending upstream review).

Building from Source

Prerequisites:

• Visual Studio 2022 with .NET desktop development workload
• .NET 6.0 SDK

Build Command:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Msbuild\Current\Bin\amd64\MSBuild.exe" RetroBar.sln -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform="Any CPU"

ManagedShell Changes

The bundled ManagedShell adds support for thumbnail toolbar buttons (the media controls you see in window previews). This required adding:

• ThumbnailButton class - A wrapper for native Windows thumbnail button data
• ThumbnailButtons property on ApplicationWindow - Exposes the button array
• ThumbnailButtonImageList property - For extracting button icons