The taskbar readout

PerchBar draws a line of text on the taskbar, at the right-hand end just before the notification icons, saying how much each group is holding:

Magnified. Only the groups holding more than one program are listed — other groups were open at the time and are deliberately absent. On the taskbar this sits just left of the clock, in the taskbar's own colour.

Groups holding nothing are left out, and when nothing is left to say the readout disappears altogether rather than showing a row of zeroes.

Choosing which groups it lists

Per group, and off for all of them to begin with: tick Include this group in the taskbar summary in the Groups dialog, for each group worth watching.

It is opt-in because this readout is the one thing here with nowhere to grow. It gets whatever room the taskbar leaves beside the clock, so a line listing every group leaves none for the group you actually care about. Until you tick one, the readout shows nothing at all.

The tray icon's tooltip is not filtered: hover it and every enabled group is there, ticked or not. It has room, and hovering is something you choose to do.

Turning it off altogether

Tray icon → Show groups on the taskbar, or the same option on the Settings dialog's Taskbar page. Beside it there, Include groups with nothing open decides whether a ticked group holding no windows is listed at all: off by default, because a row of zeroes says nothing worth the space, but it is the only way to see at a glance that a group exists.

Groups holding one program are left out

A group holding a single program is not listed at all. Its own button already says which group it is, and badges which program is in it — so the only thing this strip could add is a 1. What no button can say is how many, and that is what the readout is for: SCM · DevIDEs · Terminal: 2 is three names to carry one useful fact, where Terminal: 2 is the fact.

So the readout can be empty even with plenty grouped, and that is the intended state: nothing to report. Turn it off with Leave out groups holding one program on the Settings dialog's Taskbar page, and every ticked group is listed with its number.

What the number counts

Applications, not windows — or more precisely, it does not count a console a program opened for itself. Some programs show a console window beside their own for their log output; that is one program, in one process, and it is counted once. A program whose only window is a console — a shell, a build script — counts normally.

PerchBar still claims the console window into the group. It has to: a window it left alone would get a taskbar button of its own, outside the group, which is the whole thing PerchBar exists to prevent.

What it is, exactly

Windows offers no way to add anything to the taskbar, so this is not part of it: it is a small window of PerchBar's own, kept in position over the taskbar and painted in the taskbar's own colour, which it samples rather than assumes — so it still matches if you turn on Show accent colour on Start and taskbar.

Two things follow from that:

• Clicks pass through it. The taskbar underneath behaves exactly as it would if the readout were not there, its own right-click menu included.
• It gets out of the way. It hides itself when the taskbar is hidden — auto-hide, or a full-screen window — rather than floating over what replaced it.

The primary taskbar only. A second monitor's taskbar is a separate window, and the same summary repeated on each screen would be noise rather than information.

See also: Tray menu, How grouping works.