Welcome to TraySaver
Welcome to TraySaver!

TraySaver is a comprehensive system tray management utility. It sports a number of innovative capabilities:

•	Hide and show system tray icons

•	Restore icons that are lost in an Explorer crash

•	Automatically remove dead tray icons

•	Minimize any window to the system tray

TraySaver was made in C++ using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. It represents dozens of hours of research into very scantily documented areas of the Win32 API.

Please e-mail any comments, bug reports, or suggestions to Mike Lin at mlin@monmouth.com.

TraySaver’s home page can be found at:

http://www.monmouth.com/~mlin/TraySaver/


Hiding and Showing Tray Icons

The key to all of TraySaver’s functionality is its own tray icon. Tray icons are hidden and shown via the context menu. To access it, right-click TraySaver’s icon.

At the top of this menu are all the icons TraySaver is currently tracking. To hide an icon, select its entry in the menu. The icon will disappear from the tray and appear in the menu with the text (hidden) next to it. To show a hidden icon, simply select it again. It will appear again in the tray.

The menu also has two powerful commands, Hide All and Show All. Invoking these immediately hides or shows all the icons TraySaver is tracking.


The TraySaver Tray

The TraySaver Tray is a convenient floating window that shows your hidden tray icons. If it is not already displayed, you can display it by selecting Show TraySaver Tray in the menu. You can hide it by selecting the menu again, or by clicking the X on the window.

The TraySaver Tray allows you to directly manipulate the tray icons just as if they were sitting in the real tray. For instance, right-clicking an icon will have the same effect as right clicking it in the tray (usually bringing up a context menu).

TIP: The Tray automatically makes its minimum width the width of an icon. So, by making the window as thin as it will go, you can effectively hide the icon’s text.


Crash Recovery

If and when Explorer happens to crash, TraySaver will automatically restore all the tray icons once Explorer starts up again (which it usually does automatically). Also, when a program with a tray icon crashes, its icon normally lingers in the tray until you move the mouse over it. TraySaver will automatically remove dead icons for you.

These two abilities are completely autonomous and require no intervention on your part.


Minimizing Windows to the System Tray

TraySaver features the ability to minimize any top-level window to the system tray.

To invoke this feature, open the system menu of the window you wish to minimize by clicking on the icon in its upper-left corner. At the bottom of the menu, you should find a Minimize to Tray entry. When this is checked, minimizing the window using its normal minimize button will minimize the window to the system tray. Clicking on the icon will restore the window. Also, the icon of a minimized window can be shown or hidden just like normal tray icons.


Hotkeys

TraySaver supports several global hotkeys to make some of its commonly used features even more convenient.

Start+H – Hide All Icons

Start+S – Show All Icons

Start+T – Toggle TraySaver Tray

Start+N – Toggle Minimize to Tray for the currently active window

Note: Start is the key with the Windows logo found on almost all PC keyboards today. To invoke a hotkey, hold it down and press the appropriate letter on the keyboard.


The Settings Dialog

The settings dialog, accessed by selecting Settings in the TraySaver menu, allows you to configure various aspects of TraySaver’s operation.

Options

This tab allows you to configure optional TraySaver features. Currently these include enabling or disabling the Tray Minimizer, and enabling or disabling the global hotkeys.

Hidden Icons

TraySaver remembers which icons you hide between reboots, but in the event that you need to add some that TraySaver should always hide, you can do so by adding them here.

TraySaver identifies tray icons by their ToolTips. The ToolTip is the text that appears in the little yellow box when you hover the mouse over a tray icon for a few seconds. To make an icon automatically hidden, add its ToolTip by clicking Add and typing the ToolTip text. You can also edit or remove existing entries in the list.

The list allows you to use * and ? wildcards. * means that anything can be in place of it, and ? means that anything one letter long can be in place of it. For instance:

T*st

Will match Test and Tempest, whereas

T?st

Will only match Test.

TIP: Adding * to this list will automatically hide all your tray icons.

Ignored Icons

Ignored icons are icons that will not, under any circumstances, be hidden by TraySaver. Selecting them in the menu will have no effect on them, nor will using Hide All. You add icons to this list in the same way that you add them to the hidden list.

Icon Info

This page lets you view various internal statistics about your tray icons. This information is not really useful to the normal user, but it can be useful for developers.


Known Issues

•	TraySaver must run at system startup to work properly. It does not, never has, and never will work correctly if you start it later.

•	TraySaver will restore icons after the vast majority of Explorer crashes. On occasion, however, Explorer can screw up so amazingly badly that it actually causes TraySaver to crash too. Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done here.