How to hide labels in Windows 10 Start menu (tiles)?

Question

I've recently read some nice registry trick about hiding the taskbar labels in Windows 10 (together with "never combine" option).

I want to do the same to the start tiles. I mean: there already are nice, large icons (tiles) and labels only distracts me.

Is it possible to hide the labels e.g. via registry or settings?

I've tried with name changing of shortcuts to " " or alt+255, but none of them worked (it did a trick on Windows 8).

The closest I've got to hiding them was to rename shortcuts to ".", but that little dots are irritating:

Of course, the small icons don't have any labels by default. But I want the same for medium size tiles.

Answer 1

Mark the following line with the greater-than and lower-than-sign, copy it and paste it as the new filename for your shortcut.

>​<

The invisible unicode character ZERO WIDTH SPACE (written in HTML as ​) is in between them. When you copy that line, Windows Explorer will remove the greather-than and lower-than sign automatically and you have a shortcut without any name.

Answer 2

In case anyone else stumbles upon this, one problem with renaming the shortcuts is that you can no longer search for the app shortcut in the search menu (e.g. pressing 'Windows' > typing in 'Firefox' won't work because the Firefox shortcut has been renamed to be blank). I didn't think that trade-off was worth it, but I ended up finding an app that lets you get around this called TileIconifier.

When you open the app, you can search for each shortcut you want to remove the text from and uncheck the 'Foreground Text (Medium Icon Only)' option then tell it to 'Tile Iconify!'. The app also has the added benefit of allowing you to change the icon used in the tile, if you are into that.

Here's an example of my start tiles with custom icons: