There’s a very specific kind of chaos that feels unique to Windows. You open a browser to follow a tutorial, switch to another app to try it out, and then lose the instructions behind a pile of other windows. Then it’s Alt + Tab, over and over, flipping through what feels like a graveyard of open apps. You find it, lose it again, find something else entirely, and before you know it, twenty minutes have disappeared with nothing to show for it.
I lived this cycle for years, fully convinced it was just the price of working on a computer. Then I found WindowTop, a Windows utility with a free version and optional Pro features that rewrites how your windows behave, and my entire relationship with multitasking changed.
- OS
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Windows
- Developer
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Gil Eli
- Price model
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Freemium with paid Pro version
WindowTop enhances Windows multitasking by letting you pin apps to the top, adjust transparency, and use Picture-in-Picture to float windows. It adds smart controls like dark mode and quick window access, making it easier to juggle multiple tasks on one screen.
It shows up, does its thing, and gets out of your way
Once you install WindowTop, it sits in your system tray and keeps a low profile. There’s a full settings panel if you want to dig deeper, but you don’t need it to get started. The real magic shows up directly on your windows.
Hover your cursor over this handle near the top edge of any open window, and a compact toolbar appears, tucked just below the title bar. You’ll see a row of icons representing each of WindowTop’s features — like Always-on-Top, PiP mode, Opacity, etc. — and it’s not difficult to interact with them. Hovering over any icon gives you a tooltip, so even as a first-time user, the learning curve is gentle enough that you’ll be productive within your first few moments.
It’s subtle enough that it never gets in your way. The toolbar appears when you engage the handle and disappears when you move your cursor away. You can also assign hotkeys to your most-used actions from the tray icon’s settings window, so after a few days of use, you may find yourself operating WindowTop almost entirely from muscle memory without ever needing to click the toolbar at all.
The free version is fine, and it includes a 30-day trial of all Pro features, so you can evaluate everything before spending a cent. After the trial, the Pro version is a one-time purchase of $19 that covers up to three computers under a lifetime license.
Keep important windows exactly where you need them
Because your most important tab shouldn’t keep disappearing
The first feature I activated was Always on Top, and I strongly think it should have been a native Windows option fifteen years ago. You simply open the toolbar on any window and click the pin icon. That window will now float above every other application on your screen, no matter what you click on or open next. It even gets a colored border so you can tell at a glance what’s pinned, and you can tweak the thickness and color in its settings so it doesn’t disappear into your wallpaper.
From there, I experimented with Opacity, which serves a real purpose. You can fade a window slightly and layer it over your workspace. So, if I’m following a tutorial video while writing in a text editor, I can make the video slightly transparent and position it over my writing space, so I can see both simultaneously without splitting my screen. There is also a click-through mode, which lets you interact with whatever is behind the transparent window rather than the window itself. If you’ve ever needed to trace a layout or keep reference material hovering in place while you work, you likely understand why this is worth getting excited about.
The feature that I like the most is Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode. When you activate it on a window, that window shrinks into a compact floating thumbnail that stays visible above your other work. Unlike the browser-based PiP you might already know, WindowTop’s version works on any window: a PDF, a spreadsheet, a Slack conversation, or even a game. You can resize it however you like, and it’s still interactive, so you can scroll or type without dragging the full window back into focus.
There’s also a crop feature that pairs nicely with PiP. Instead of shrinking an entire window, you can select just a portion of it and display that. If you only need to watch someone’s slides during a meeting while you take notes, you don’t need the entire video conference window cluttering your view. You crop the slides, shrink the results to thumbnails, and make your screen less chaotic. WindowTop can also automatically detect crop regions for you using a smart selection tool, eliminating the extra step of manually dragging a selection box each time.
You can switch windows without the gymnastics
Out of sight no longer means out of mind
Anchors is WindowTop’s most inventive feature, and it is the one that changes how you mentally relate to your open windows. It solves a really simple, really annoying problem. The moment one window gets covered by another, it basically disappears from your awareness. Your options are the usual ones: Alt+Tab through a crowded lineup, or poke around the taskbar hoping you land on the right thing. Neither feels great when you’ve got a lot going on.
With Anchors, when a window is fully covered by other windows, WindowTop creates a small floating icon along the edge of your screen, usually on the right by default. That icon represents the hidden window, and if you click it, the window jumps straight back to the front. The icon disappears again until the window gets tucked away once more.
There are a couple of small touches that make it even more useful. You can right-click an Anchor icon to minimize its window, or middle-click to close it outright. And since Anchors also ties into PiP mode, even a cropped or shrunken window gets its own icon, with a little visual cue showing its current state. It makes jumping back into a specific task feel almost frictionless.
Once you have explored the core features, WindowTop reveals a more experimental side. Dark Mode is one, though it deserves a small caveat. WindowTop can apply a dark theme to individual windows that do not natively support one, which you might think of as minor until you realize how many legacy apps and web-based tools still blast bright white interfaces at you at midnight. While you can turn on dark mode for all your apps using system settings, WindowTop handles the stubborn programs that those global toggles often miss. On Windows 11, this feature works reliably. On Windows 10, it can behave unpredictably depending on the application, so consider that a fair heads-up before you go experimenting.
And if you want to go further, Glass Mode offers a more refined take on transparency. Instead of making an entire window uniformly see-through, it lets you control the opacity of backgrounds, text, and images separately. It adds an adjustable blur effect for a frosted-glass aesthetic. It is more resource-intensive on 4K displays, but if you are running an Nvidia GPU, it leverages CUDA acceleration to keep things smooth.
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It doesn’t change Windows; it changes how you use it
Windows multitasking has always asked users to adapt to its limitations. WindowTop flips that dynamic by asking your windows to adapt to you instead. So, if your desktop has been in that “barely controlled chaos” state for a long time, this is a good place to start reclaiming it.
