WinTray

The desktop is where you get to handle all windows you need to work with, and it can easily become a crowded space. Almost all running programs are visible in the taskbar, and there’s only so much space there too. However, you can use specialized applications like WinTray to send any window to the tray area.

A major advantage is that the application skips you the whole time and effort required to go through a setup process, which means you’re able to easily carry it around on a thumb drive in case you need this feature on other computers besides your own. Registry entries are not affected in the process, so the target PC’s health status remains intact.

The configuration window shows up on launch, showing all active instances in an organized table which also displays window handle value, title, hotkey, and icon. The application works by granting you the liberty to assign a hotkey command to any item on the list. Sadly, only one special key can be used in the combination, and only alphabetical and numerical characters can be used.

Apart from a hotkey command, you can also select an icon to display in the tray area. There are up to 30 different presets and you can also load your own. This makes it easy to identify programs, but it would have been useful to see an option to use the program’s own icon.

In case a specific program isn’t running, you can easily set a custom hotkey command to use based on the window title. It’s also possible to set a tray icon just like for the rest of the items. Making it run with Windows needs to be manually done by adding a shortcut to the Startup folder.

WinTray is a practical application which comes in handy regardless of the activity you’re performing on a PC. Custom hotkeys can be assigned to both active, and inactive windows based on their title, while the possibility to attach an icon makes identification easy in the tray area.