## What it is
HideDesktopApps is a small Windows tray utility that makes your desktop disappear — and come back — on a hotkey. Desktop icons, the taskbar, and every open window, each on its own shortcut. Ctrl+Alt+H clears the icons, Ctrl+Alt+T hides the taskbar, press again to restore.
## Why I built it
Three situations kept producing the same annoyance: a Wallpaper Engine wallpaper buried under a grid of icons, a screen share about to expose a desktop full of files, and wanting a clean frame for a screenshot. Windows gives you a right-click toggle for icons buried in a context menu and nothing at all for a one-shot "clean slate." So this is the missing keyboard shortcut.
## How it works
It's a native tray app in Rust — no Electron, no runtime, a few MB resident. It talks to the Win32 shell directly: toggling the visibility of the desktop's icon container, the taskbar's app bar, and the windows themselves, with global hotkeys registered at the OS level so it works no matter what has focus. Everything it hides is restored exactly as it was, because the windows are only hidden, never closed or moved.
## Getting it
Builds are on the releases page, and the repo carries a Scoop manifest so it installs and updates as a managed package rather than a zip you have to remember to re-download:
scoop install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Londopy/HideDesktopApps/main/scoop/HideDesktopApps.json