Minimizing Windows To SysTray (clock area)

[Keene Coder]

How do I minimize a window to the system tray (area by clock)?

I want to have an AutoIt script sit in the system tray & when a hotkey or menu item is pressed it will minimize the currently active window to the system tray. Is this possible in AutoIt?

Regards

Brian Keene

[zeroZshadow]

u could try to make it just hide, and set a show command on clicking the trayicon

[Keene Coder]

True, but I'm hoping to be able to put multiple windows into the SysTray. So this wouldn't work. Also, I would like to have an icon in the SysTray for the program/window, not just for my script.

Good suggestion though.

Regards

Brian Keene

[LxP]

So has the outlook for this functionality improved yet?

I know that someone has worked on functionality to remove/restore icons from/to the system tray, so is it likely that it could be slightly further extended perhaps to minimise multiple non-AutoIt windows to the tray?

Obviously the biggest problem with this is that if the script quits without 'restoring' the windows then the windows remain hidden, but that shouldn't be a fatal problem.

[layer]

You need the latest BETA to minimize to tray.

[LxP]

Oh! I didn't realise that it was already doable with AutoIt's native functions.

Could you please post some code demonstrating how to minimise a Notepad window to the tray? (Edit: because there are no obvious functions in the help file index that suggest the behaviour.)

Edited July 30, 2005 by LxP

[buzz44]

WinSetState("Notepad window title", "", @SW_MINIMIZE)

[JoeCool]

:-)

http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14031

[LxP]

Thanks for the responses guys, but these aren't quite what I'm after (a method to minimise a non-AutoIt window to the tray).

WinSetState("Notepad window title", "", @SW_MINIMIZE)

only minimises Notepad to the taskbar, while this thread demonstrates how to minimise an AutoIt-built GUI to the tray (which is quite handy anyway, JoeCool!).

Any other ideas?

[buzz44]

You can't minimize a notepad window to the tray, it doesn't have an icon...

But I think for windows like NAV you just close the window and it minimizes.

[LxP]

You can't minimize a notepad window to the tray, it doesn't have an icon...

In theory it would be possible for AutoIt (and any other program) to minimise any window it likes to a system tray icon if it follows these steps:

• Note the icon used by the window.
• Hide the window.
• Create a new icon in the tray with the icon noted before.
• Set the icon so that a left-click shows the window and destroys the icon.
• Optionally attach a right-click menu of Restore, Maximise and Close to the icon.

Many programs (including PowerPro and The Wonderful Icon) adopt this approach to give the user the possibility of minimising any window they like to the tray.

As stated somewhere above, an AutoIt script could do this for one window at a time because it can only manipulate one tray icon (its own).

[buzz44]

I thought you meant without external forces. You can't minimize your notepad window to the tray manually can you?

[Lazycat]

I use PowerPro with the right muse button click on the minimize button.

Just an idea (probably lame) how it can be done with autoit: create one host script, that will be do main work and simple tray based script, that will accept params from commandline. When you do something (right mouse click, hotkey etc) in the main script for minimize for example active window, main script take window handle, file name and start instance of second script with this parameters. When second script run, it's hide window and create systray element with icon from file name, given in commandline.

Not tried at all, but I guess this can work.

[LxP]

I thought you meant without external forces. You can't minimize your notepad window to the tray manually can you?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

No; there's no standard Windows-certified way of doing this.

Programs that implement this functionality for themselves simply hide their window and set their tray icon to show the window again, while programs that operate on 'foreign' windows do so in the fashion that I described above.

Edited July 31, 2005 by LxP

[LxP]

Not tried at all, but I guess this can work.

That's a very interesting idea, Lazycat. It would work but the downside of it is that for each tray-minimised program, another AutoIt process would be required. On my system a one-line script consisting of a MsgBox() takes up 4½MB of memory.

This will definitely suit my purposes until a single-process solution arises though. Thanks again!

[Lazycat]

It would work but the downside of it is that for each tray-minimised program, another AutoIt process would be required. On my system a one-line script consisting of a MsgBox() takes up 4½MB of memory.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, you right, this is really downside that each minimized window should have own process... But from other side, biggest part of this size - shared libraries, so each identical additional process should take only about 160 kb - autoit stub size.

[buzz44]

Why can't you just have one script, one icon, one instance of AutoIt that controls all windows? Why can't they all minimize to the same AutoIt tray icon.

Edited July 31, 2005 by Burrup

[LxP]

Doable but not as intuitive an approach. For instance, if you see Firefox and Cygwin icons in your tray then you pretty much know that Firefox and Cygwin are in memory.

Edit: this would be an interesting idea for the Scripts and Scraps forum nonetheless, and most likely a useful utility for quite a few people! Someone should program it!

Edited July 31, 2005 by LxP