How to display the date on taskbar with small icons in Windows 10

[Musk]

Hi everyone I'm trying to get my small taskbar to display both time and date, like the regular big taskbar.

By default, Windows displays time and date on the taskbar in bottom-right corner. But if you go into taskbar's properties and select the option to show smaller icons, the taskbar becomes a little bit smaller (which is great) and there's no room for date to be displayed (which is not great at all).

I found a few "solutions" for Windows 7, like using some third-party apps to override the default one (but there's all kinds of issues with them), or creating a new toolbar pointing to a folder that is being renamed everyday via schedule (ridiculous!) and so on.

Back when I was using Windows 7, I found a dark theme that actually solved this problem (google "cryeR deviantart windows 7 basic black theme"). You had to take ownership and replace the Aero.msstyles file, and then patch some stuff with provided utility. Kinda complicated, but it worked.

Now I'm on Windows 10, and I can't find anything that would work. I really like the smaller taskbar, but I would also like to see the date... It looks like changing the font size to something smaller would help, but I can't find any way to do that.

Any ideas?

 

[Trouble]

Any ideas?

I don't know if I would actually call it an idea or not, but.....
I don't believe you can change that default behavior, in that, it's a condition of the state of the taskbar when you switch to small icons.
What you can do is unlock your taskbar and drag the upper edge up with your mouse pointer and you will then see the date and if you drag it up a little more you'll even see the day.

I think that, that pretty much defeats the whole purpose of "small icons" but.... there you go.
Just hovering over the clock does it for me, but.... then..... I'm easy.

 

[Musk]

Thanks for replying!

Yea, that's one of "solutions" I found googling around. It actually would be an ok solution if I could make the taskbar just a couple pixels bigger, just so the date is displayed again. But sadly dragging the upper edge makes it double the size, it's even bigger than a regular taskbar with big icons, which completely defeats this solution.

I'm pretty sure though that changing the font to something smaller or making the taskbar a couple pixels bigger would fix it, as I noticed something interesing:
By default, my date was displayed in the following format - dd.MM.rrrr
Small taskbar only shows time, but I noticed there's a little bit of empty space on both sides of the time.
I then changed the format of date to dd.MM, and the empty space is gone now, so I guess Windows still tries to display the date, but since there's no room it gets cut off.
It doesn't really change anything, other than that now I know that small taskbar isn't explicitly programmed to not display the date no matter what or something

Maybe there's a way to show time and date side by side, that would be great too.