Question About Results from @WINSTATE

[Jay Sage]

The new version of Take Command has gotten me to read through the documentation and experiment with some things that I have not tried before. Case in point: the WINSTATE function.

I have the apps Signal and WhatsApp running, and both appear to be minimized (I see both of them in the taskbar, and both of them got there by clicking on the "Minimize" button at the top right corner of their windows. However, the values of WINSTATE are different.

->echo %@winstate[signal*]​

2​

​

->echo %@winstate[whatsapp*]​

0​

WhatsApp is hidden, not minimized. This is consistent with the fact that the ACTIVATE command with the /RESTORE option does not bring its window back.

Can someone who understands the details of Windows better than I do explain this. Also, is there a way that I can "activate" a program that is hidden this way?

A further puzzle is that activate "whatsapp*" /hide makes the window go away, the WINSTATE function again reports it as hidden, but the command activate "whatsapp*] /restore brings it back. The "Minimize" button at the corner of the window is doing something funny.

 

[rconn]

@WINSTATE returns the result of the showCmd field in the GetWindowPlacement API call. With a minor kludge to set the value to SW_HIDE if the window is not visible (to work around a Windows bug).

 

[Jay Sage]

There are apparently more states than those returned by @WINSTATE. I have two types of "hidden" tasks, one of which can be restored and one that cannot. From what AI told me, a "hidden" task should not appear on the task bar, but WhatsApp does, even though it is reported as hidden, and not even restorable by the activate command.

I do understand that this is not a Take Command issue, but I thought that someone on the forum (notably Rex) might understand what's going on.