About PerchBar

One taskbar button for a group of applications — including the ones that are already running, however you started them.

Launchers can start applications into a group. PerchBar also takes an application you started some other way and moves its window onto the group's button, so nothing has to be launched through it for grouping to happen. That is the whole reason it exists; everything else is in support of it. The documentation covers the rest.

What it costs

Nothing. PerchBar is free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial, on any number of computers, with no payment, no subscription, no account, no registration and no licence key. It reaches the network only for the update check, and only when you ask it to — see Checking for updates.

It is not open source. The source code is not published, and the licence is deliberately narrower than an open-source one: you may pass on the official package exactly as it was published, write about it and screenshot it; you may not sell it, modify or repackage it, or decompile it. The full terms are in LICENSE, in the archive and in the program under About → Credits.

Releases up to and including 2026.1.0.112 were published under the MIT licence and remain under it. A permission already granted is not withdrawn; the current licence governs releases after that one.

What it is built with

Windows, its SDK and the Visual C++ runtime, and nothing else — no third-party library is compiled into it. THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt records what that means, in the archive and under Credits.

Get in touch

Suggestions, bug reports and questions are all welcome, including "it would be better if it did X" — a good deal of what PerchBar does started that way.