IDEA: Hide current window / restore any hidden window

[Fedorov]

Hi all (first post) longtime lurker - too long!

http://tinyurl.com/y9nh4e

Believe it or not WatchCat 2.0 even works under Windows Vista - I have been using this great tool for so many years now, just very unfortunate that the author stopped working on it, his site disappeared but there are still a few freeware sites like the one above still listing his great program.

I have a copy of it should anyone wish me to email to them for cloning these simple features

In a nutshell I use the Hide/Show windows functionality of this program like a "Boss key" - I have the key to the left of my "1" key set to HIDE my current window, so in the event of me using my web browser for my online banking I can quickly press this key to HIDE my Firefox window.

I've then got Alt + this same key (to the left of the "1" key, above TAB) will show a popup window down in my tray which lists all my visible windows and also my HIDDEN windows, I can then press the UP arrow key to quickly select my HIDDEN window from a list, press enter and it restores to my screen!

WatchCat does a billion other cool things with windows - maybe leave those for future enhancements!
Below are some screenshots of WatchCat so you can better understand how it looks, the only other thing this tool would need are the 2 options in the main options window you can see where you can tell it to always start with Windows and also to hide the WatchCat icon from the system tray so nobody else knows it is running on your machine - I've had this on my machine for probably 7 or 8 years now and nobody knows I have it.

You can see in the screenshots I've hit the Alt + hotkey to show my window list, it shows SnagIt as a window, but more importantly it shows I have this Firefox window and Notepad hidden (blue H icon denotes "hidden").

I have YET to find any other tool that can give me this simple hide/showing of windows with a couple of hotkeys...

Thanks!

Fedorov.

[rjbull]

Hello, Fedorov; welcome to DC's roster of members who post   

Not sure this should be in the "Post New Requests" section, but I'll leave that to the moderators 

I use HoeKey for this task.  It doesn't have the popup menu in the sense you mean, but successive presses of the assigned "hide" hotkey puts windows on a stack, and pressing the "unhide" key pops them off again.  HoeKey is a general-purpose hotkey application, and it's tiny, only about a 25K download.  Lots of other nice features, like "kill current process," "editify" current window (gets window details as text), etc.

[Fedorov]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion I'll give that a try, looks like AutoHotKey could be useful for this, seems a popular tool.