I use the Windows 11 Pro operating system for work, and one of my favorite features is “Show Desktop” which can be enabled in Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > “Select the far corner of the taskbar to show the desktop”. This feature has been around since Windows 7. I simply click on the lower right corner of my screen, and poof—all windows are minimized, and I have a clean view of my desktop. For decades, I have grown accustomed to flicking my pointer to the far lower right corner and clicking to show the desktop.
With a recent Windows 11 Pro software update, Microsoft has decided to make my life harder by moving the click target of the Show Desktop feature. It’s still in the lower right corner, but it’s no longer in the FAR lower right corner. The click target is a few pixels up and to the left of the lower right corner. So now instead of mindlessly flicking my pointer to the lower right corner and clicking, I have to go to the lower right corner and carefully reposition the pointer to hit the target. The feature is still there, it’s just harder to use and distracts my attention from what I was doing at the time. I found two alternatives to clicking the harder-to-locate Show Desktop target.
Option #1: Keyboard shortcut. Did you know that you can simply press “Win + D” to show the desktop? It’s so easy! This will be my new default method for showing the desktop, but I need to retrain my brain to use the shortcut because I am so accustomed to using the lower right corner. But if you’re not a fan of keyboard shortcuts, then…
Option #2: Create a bigger Show Desktop button. You can use a shell command that invokes Windows Explorer and tells it to show the desktop. To do this, create a shortcut with the following target:
C:\Windows\explorer.exe shell:::{3080F90D-D7AD-11D9-BD98-0000947B0257}
The alphanumeric ID in curly braces is the CLSID (Class ID) for the Show Desktop function. Name the shortcut “Show Desktop” or something similar, and pin it to the taskbar. You can optionally change the shortcut icon in its Properties settings if you’d like. A set of step-by-step instructions is provided here. By pinning this shortcut to the taskbar, you’ll have a larger target to hit.
If you have also found that the Show Desktop feature is now more difficult to use, I hope you’ll find one of these 2 alternative options to be useful to you. And maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will hear enough negative feedback that they’ll put the click target back into its original location in the far lower right corner.
