Close to tray

I mentioned this in discord and was asked to post it here. I would like to see an option to minimize to the system tray when the window is closed, as well as a global hotkey to hide/show the window. Both Flashnote, and My Notes Keeper which I used prior to Obsidian, had this feature and it is very nice to have it always a hotkey away but not always on the taskbar.

57 Likes

I want minimize and expands itself to the system tray using hotkey like Flashnote too. it is very comfortable. I cannot switch to obsidian completely because of this.

1 Like

+1

I really miss the “Autostart” and “Minimize to Try” option.
That’s pretty much standard on Windows for note-taking apps.

4 Likes

I’m trying to unify my notes from different platforms (and years) in Obsidian and the function of keeping the app always open is really missing. For now I am getting around using Alltray (linux), but, it would be fantastic that this feature was native.

:vulcan_salute:

2 Likes

I really hope for this feature, which would make note-taking much more comfortable!

Oh yes, minimize to tray, please! :slight_smile: Moving from evernote without having the new note-taking app’s icon always available in the tray feels like I’m gonna have a bad time.

Does anyone have any ideas how to make this work in Windows until it hopefully gets added?

This can be accomplished using AutoHotkey. Can be a bit time consuming to work out though…

Have been using Actual Window Minimizer by Actual Tools for this as it’s really quick to get working; point and click, with a few tweaks.

Note that while AWM has a “Close minimizes to tray” option, which works with any “regularly titled app”, it doesn’t work well with these electron/chrome based apps, i.e. Obsidian. Nor does Obsidian create/expose the minimize button normally.

AWM has an option to put special overlay buttons. Note in the image below there is a little white dot under the regular minimize dash. That overlay makes the minimize button minimize to tray…

…and here it is nicely in the tray…

image

Will post back if I end up creating an AutoHotkey version, which should allow fixing of the close/minimize without overlay. Or resorting to a paid program (like Actual Window Minimizer). Though I will say at $20, I find it well worth it when I just want to minimize to tray with AHK programming fuss…

(no affiliation w/ Actual Tools, just a satisfied user)

For the devs or plugin makers looking to implement this here is an Electron snippet I found for running in the background.
The workarounds have been really awkward for me, hope this gets fixed soon.

You can use RBtray to do this for free. It makes it so that whenever you right-click on the minimize button, the app gets put into the system tray. These workarounds are okay, but there are plenty of functionalities which aren’t supported.

  • If you try to open Obsidian while it’s in the system tray, it doesn’t pop that window out, but instead let’s you open a new one. For me personally, it’s quite annoying to need to go to the system tray all the time to open an app.
  • It doesn’t automatically send the window to system tray when you want to close it, so the app won’t always be open and this is pretty much the primary reason why I’d want this feature.
  • Obsidian can’t be launched in system tray on startup with this method.
  • etc.
1 Like

+1. fast open

I guess you’re using Windows, so this doesn’t help you (but in case anyone else needs this), but on a Mac, the global ⌘H keyboard shortcut does this, and you can ⌘Tab back to the app.

It’s great if we could run Obsidian in system tray at startup with preloading vaults and Obsidian Sync.

+1 - Minimize to tray.

I just registered to say that I also dearly miss this feature!

1 Like

The lack of a global shortcut to hide/show the window was a huge productivity hit, so I made this autohotkey script that hacks it in.

I expect it to have edge cases, maybe glitchiness sometimes as has to be expected every time you try to hack features like this into an app (this should really just be built it). For example, it doesn’t account for multiple windows.

ScrollLock::
	global hidden_obsidian_window_id

	window_id := WinExist("ahk_exe Obsidian.exe")

	; If app window exists (hidden windows are ignored by WinExist)
	if (window_id) {
		; Check if it's focused
		if (WinActive("ahk_id " . window_id)) {
			; Activate previous window
			Send !{Esc}
			; Save window id and hide
			hidden_obsidian_window_id := window_id
			WinHide, % "ahk_id " . window_id
		} else {
			; Focus
			WinActivate, % "ahk_id " . window_id
		}
	} else {
		if (hidden_obsidian_window_id) {
			; Unhide
			WinShow, % "ahk_id " . hidden_obsidian_window_id
			WinActivate, % "ahk_id " . hidden_obsidian_window_id
			hidden_obsidian_window_id := false
		} else {
			; Launch the app
			EnvGet, A_LocalAppData, LocalAppData
			Run, % A_LocalAppData . "\Obsidian\Obsidian.exe"
		}
	}
	return
1 Like

This little old freeware https://github.com/igr/dm2/releases/tag/v1.23.1 does it in Windows

Is what I’ve been using, since it has keyboard shortcuts for both hide to tray and unhide from tray. However, native support to show/hide window (like Notion-Rapackaged) with a dedicated hotkey would be ideal.

@Licat @Silver ny plan native support?

1 Like

+1 This feature will be very helpfule in Obsidian App :).