Window Hide Tool

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on June 28, 2012

Window Hide Tool is a freeware "boss key" app. They go by many names, but the object is always the same: to instantly hide an open window that you don't want someone else (like the boss) to see, simultaneously preserving both the illusion of productivity and whatever it was you had going on that would shatter it. The best boss keys let you program hot keys that quickly and unobtrusively drop the target window while you type or click. Window Hide Tool is one of the best we've tried. You can program basic commands such as to hide a single window, a group of windows, or all windows. You can specify groups of windows by their title text (such as "Firefox" or "Internet Explorer") and designate hot keys that will close all the windows in the group at once. You can also close windows by clicking a system tray icon.

A system tray menu accesses Window Hide Tool's basic functions and settings. We clicked Preferences to configure the program, which involved designating actions for keyboard hot keys and mouse clicks as well as selecting options such as requiring a password when performing various functions and hiding the tray icon when windows are hidden. We returned to the system tray menu and clicked Windows Groups, which called up a simple dialog for adding, deleting, and editing groups of windows. IE is selected by default, though no hot keys are designated. We assigned single keys to both the Hide and Show commands, clicked OK, and then opened IE. Pressing our first hot key closed all our open IE tabs and windows at once; pressing the second restored them. Excellent.

Window Hide Tool's Help file refers occasionally to a tool known as AceHide, which sounds like something that used to get riverboat gamblers killed, but it clearly explains how Window Hide Tool works. We ought to know because we didn't look at it until we'd already used Window Hide Tool; that's how easy it is to get started with this effective computer security tool. It's more the user's security than the computer's, actually, but that works for us.