minimizing Tk programs to the taskbar

[Alex Martelli]

Cameron Laird wrote:

> In article <Vz_h9.126208$pX1.4528221 at news2.tin.it>,
>
> Alex Martelli  <aleax at aleax.it> wrote:
> >Richard Tardif wrote:
> >> Is there any way to minimize programs to the taskbar? I'm talking about
> >> windows here. By taskbar I mean the area down in the bottom right
> >> corner, near the clock, that shows icons for what proggies you've got
        ...
> ?  Alex and Richard, I think you'll want to experiment with
>   root = Tkinter.Tk()
>     ...
>   Tkinter.Wm.iconify(root)

Nope: this (at least on Win/98 -- I have no other Win release at hand to 
try,
but I don't think the difference matters here) minimizes the window in the
normal way, NOT to the system-tray, which Richard described as "the
area down in the bottom right" and (probably mis-)named "taskbar".

> Alex' intuition that a lot of the operations people say they
> want are platform- or window-manager-specific is certainly
> apt.

Sure, but Richard did say he meant Windows (though he probably should
have uppercased that) -- that's pretty much an acknowledgment of
being platform-specific.  On Win in particular, crowding the system tray
with a zillion icons was all the rage once -- so many programs did it,
particularly device drivers and various daemons, as to make things more
or less unusable.  Win/XP now tries to help by hiding most of the system
tray except icons used recently, unless one specifically 'opens' the tray.
It's still somewhat of a mess (and becomes worse, the more programmers
learn to use Shell_NotifyIcon:-), but that's another issue.


Alex