Manage your desktop windows better with Xneat

Posted on March 3, 2008 at 7:14 am

If you use Windows, chances are you are used to looking at a lot of windows of all kinds [that sounds confusing.] Open, minimized, maximized and what not. Sadly, Windows does not really offer much in terms of window management tools. But with XNeat, this is set to change.

Xneat adds a couple of cool features to the Windows taskbar and system tray that allow you to minimize any window or application to an icon in the system tray (instead of the taskbar), keep any window on top, set a custom transparency level for windows, and also hide any window or tray icon, furthermore the program allows you to re-arrange the order of the buttons on the taskbar by simply dragging them around.

XNeat is freeware that is a small download of ~300KB. It is really simple to get up and running, and even runs on Vista smoothly. It really is worth a quick look. Here’s why.

Interface

Once you have installed XNeat, run it and you should have the XNeat Icon in your tray. Right-click it and you will get a pop-up menu. Hit options, and you will get something that looks like this :

This is pretty much the entire interface of the program. Talk about minimalist. The interface is wonderfully simple, and you should have no trouble navigating around. Clicking the “Options” button for any of the four brings up a window which allows you to configure exactly what it will do to that part of your OS. For example, clicking on the “Options” for the Taskbar buttons button will bring up a window that looks like this :

This window is the options window Again, minimalist to say the least. Something I really liked and appreciated is that there is a help tab, as compared to a full-fledged help file. This really gives you information where you need it. The Help feature should get you through any difficulties you might face. You get similar windows by clicking on the other “Options” buttons.

XNeat itself rests in your tray, completely out of the way and will never bother you. Someone likes minimalism.

Features

As you can see from the first screen-shot, this program extends into three aspects, the Taskbar, the Titlebar and a “Hot Menu”.

Lets start of with the Taskbar. XNeat offers three cool Taskbar tweaks. Sadly, one of these, viz. the “Group similar Taskbar buttons”, is already built into Windows, so it left me wondering as to why it was included.

Looking on the bright side, the other two are useful and I particularly liked the “Sort using Drag and Drop” as I usually have an unhealthy amount of windows open at the same time, and this really helped. This basically allows you to alter the order of your minimized windows.

The Titlebar menu and Taskbar Context Menu can be configured to be one and the same, but this is where the real power of this program lies. Right-clicking on a Window’s Titlebar or Taskbar icon now brings up a enhanced context menu [the elements of which can be set using the options menu] with additional features such as transparency, forcing a window to stay on top, minimizing to tray and hiding. The enhanced right-click menu looks like this:

The hiding and minimizing to tray features are the most useful of the lot, and can be really useful when you are running out of Taskbar space. The hiding feature actually minimizes a window, but not to the Taskbar or even the tray, but to the Hot Menu, which brings us to the next topic.

The Hot Menu is a menu which can be invoked anytime by simply pressing the Windows Key+Space Bar. This key combo brings up a menu that looks like this :

The Hot Menu is the kind of thing that will take a while to get used to, but once you do, you will start wondering how you lived without it. It is fast and efficient, and even if this software came with just the Hot Menu, I would have still recommended it.

Overall, it will take a while to be able to use the features of this nifty little program efficiently, but once you do, it will be worth it. You can also check out another post I had written earlier about a program called WinTabber, which allows you to organize your desktop windows.

This is a guest post written by Om J. Bathija, a tech enthusiast and blogger.

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