How to replace taskbar previews with list view on Windows 10
When you hover your mouse cursor over an open app’s taskbar icon, you get a little preview window of it. We covered a little trick that lets you change the size of the preview window if the default one doesn’t suit you. If you’d rather replace the taskbar previews with list view, you can do that as well. This list view is a relic from Windows 7 (perhaps older). Back then, the taskbar icons didn’t show preview windows, they instead gave you a list of the open windows. Here’s how you can get the list view back.
Taskbar list view for apps
In order to replace the taskbar preview window with list view, you will have to edit the registry and for that you need admin rights.
Tap the Win+R keyboard shortcut to open the run box. In the run box, type ‘regedit’ and tap Enter. Alternatively, you can search for the Registry Editor in Windows Search and run it from there.
Once you have the registry editor open, navigate to the following location;
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband
Right-click the Taskband key and select New>DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name the value NumThumbnails. Make sure its value is set to 1.
After that, you need to restart File Explorer. The easiest way to do this is to open the Task Manager and look for Windows Explorer on the Processes tab. Select it, and click Restart at the bottom right.
When you hover your mouse cursor over the taskbar icon of a running app, you will get a list of the open windows instead of the previews.
If you want, you can completely disable the previews and the list.
This isn’t just a cosmetic change. If your system tends to run slow or is sluggish when handling heavier apps, this will allow you to switch between windows much more quickly. Windows 10 will no longer try to show a preview which is a more resource intensive process than just listing the title of a window.
The list will appear when you hover the mouse cursor over an open app’s taskbar icon or when you left click it. Click any window in the list to switch to it. The jumplist will still be there. You have to right-click an app’s taskbar icon to get it, the same as before.
For slower systems, this is a really practical modification to make. You should also consider turning of animations. Doing so won’t make your system lightning fast but it will still have an impact.
Just what I was looking for, thank you! I like being able to see the full (or at least more of) the file names when I hover over the program icon on the taskbar. For times when it helps to see thumbnail previews, I can still use alt-tab or Win-tab.
This problem of showing open taskbar icons as a list instead of previews in win 10 was driving me nuts. This article fixed it [I hope] and Thank YOU…
A similar process works for Windows 11 too. Thanks!
thank you! – that has worked wonderfully – now if you could just let me know how to do the same thing with outlook email – I hate that even more.
Dear Fatima,
Thank you for posting this. Very helpful.
It works when there are two or more instances of an app open.
For one, the thumbnail is still there.
This is not that annoying however.
Thanks, gain,
John
Quick note that a better way to end Explorer is to Ctrl-Shift-Right click on the task bar which will add a “Exit Explorer” to the context menu. That’s better than killing the process.
Thank you for this, I have one application that has about 20 windows and I need to switch between them occasionally. The previews don’t always pop-up so half the time I’m guessing. Changing to list view is the perfect solution and it worked flawlessly. Took me about one minute to make the change.
Thank youQ
I take that back it worked perfectly (I typo’d NumThubmnails).
THANK YOU!
This didn’t work as intended. I followed the steps exactly (I am very familiar with the Windows Registry and I have admin rights), and I still get thumbnails when I hover over my icons.