ShideWin

Introduction

ShideWin enumerates all top-level windows and allows you to show or hide them.

It can help you get back windows that were made invisible for some reason:

Your multiple virtual desktop software crashed
The window is only accessible via the system tray and the icon disappeared (when explorer.exe is killed for instance)
You've hidden it with ShideWin ;)

It can also be interesting to see what windows are actually in your desktop environment without you even being aware of it.

Downloads

Download ShideWin here

Source code

How to use ShideWin

When launched, ShideWin fills a listbox with the captions of all top-level windows. If a caption can't be found, then the window's handle is used. Selected items are the visible windows.

You can show or hide a window by selecting/deselecting an item.
To do this, you can:

Click on the item
Use the Space key. Use the Up and Down keys to navigate through the items

If you leave the mouse cursor on an item, a tooltip box will show some information on the window (position and size).

Use the F5 key to refresh the list.

Use the Esc key to exit the program.

Awards / Reviews

"ShideWin basically shows, how the simple idea about the functional minimalism can be taken right. It's a common characteristic of tools working with the most general idea in their environment."

3d2f.com

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

See the GNU General Public License for more details.

About

ShideWin was written in C++ using SciTE editor.

It was compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

The Microsoft Platform SDK was used for the Win32 libraries.

This program was written with raw Win32 functions. As a result, ShideWin is quite small and fast, though it took some hard work just to have that ugly minimalist interface ;)

The source code has been used by Compendium Developments to create a similar program: Force Window Visible, according to the GPL terms.

Shidewin is part of the Wistinga Projects.