How to enable and use Search bar in Task Manager of Windows 11

In this tutorial, we will help you with how to enable and use the Search bar in Task Manager of Windows 11. The new Task Manager in Windows 11 comes with a beautiful UI, a dedicated Settings page, and a navigation pane to access Processes, App history, Users, Performance sections, and more. Now Microsoft is improving it further by adding a search bar or a search box to it. With this, you will be able to search for running apps, processes, and services in the task manager by PID, name, or publisher.

As of now, the search bar in Windows 11 task manager is an experimental feature that you can use with insider build 25231 or newer. By default, this feature remains hidden for all users but you can enable it easily with a simple command-line tool called ViveTool and then start using it. Let’s check how to do it.

How to enable the Search bar in Task Manager of Windows 11

The steps to enable the search bar in Windows 11 task manager are as follows:

Download ViveTool from github.com and then extract its downloaded ZIP in a folder
Access the folder where you extracted the files, select the ViVeTool.exe application, and press the Ctrl+Shift+C hotkey to copy the path
Right-click on the Start button and select Terminal (Admin)
Open Command Prompt or PowerShell window in the Windows Terminal app. Or else, you can open an elevated Command Prompt window or PowerShell window separately
Paste the copied path of ViVeTool.exe
Continue and complete the command with an id argument and an enable argument to enable the search bar. The entire command is:

ViVeTool.exe /enable /id:39420424

When the command is executed successfully, sign out and sign in to your Windows 11 PC or restart your system if this doesn’t work. You have enabled the search bar.

Using the Task Manager Search bar in Windows 11

Open the Task Manager using the taskbar right-click menu or any other way and you will see a search box in the top middle part (or title bar) of the task manager. Now you can start using it to search for any background process, running apps or services. The search results are displayed instantly. But here are a few things to consider for using the search bar in Windows 11 task manager:

The search box will show you the result(s) in the task manager only when you have typed the exact name/publisher/PID, including the capital and small letters. For example, if you are looking for an app say TheWindowsClub and you perform the search query as the windows club or The Windows Club, etc., then it won’t display any result
The search bar appears in all the sections of the task manager. But, it will grey out in the Performance section
It seems to work on the Processes and Details section only. For other sections, you can start a search, but it does nothing.

This feature works well for me except it hanged or crashed the task manager a few times when performing the search. Hope such a bug will be fixed as the feature improves.

Disable the Task Manager Search bar in Windows 11

In case you don’t need the search bar in the task manager, you can remove or disable the task manager search bar using the disable command and ViVeTool. Open Command Prompt or PowerShell window as administrator and execute the following command:

ViVeTool.exe /disable /id:39420424

Restart the PC and the change will take effect.

How do I enable search in Windows 11?

If you want to enable the floating desktop search bar in Windows 11, then you can use ViVeTool with an elevated CMD window and execute the vivetool.exe addconfig 37969115 2 command. This feature works with insider build 25210 or newer and not on the stable release of Windows 11.

Why can’t I use the Search bar in Windows 11?

The search bar or new search button in Windows 11 taskbar can be enabled and used with Windows 11 Version 22H2 (build 22621.754 or newer). So, to use the new search bar in the taskbar, you should first update your PC and then you can enable it. On the other hand, if you want to add a search bar to the task manager in Windows 11, then read this post and follow the covered steps.