eXtra Buttons

I discovered eXtra Buttons recently and I am pretty sure that if you use Windows, you will find this utility very useful in a myriad number of ways. eXtra Buttons adds all sorts of functionality to the behaviour of application windows.

For example, you can make any window stay always on top, minimize to the system tray, roll up like a shade, become translucent or transparent and many more of such cool tricks. To facilitate this, it adds extra buttons to the left of the standard buttons at the top right corner of all windows. If you find the sight of buttons distracting (like I do) you can instead choose to have these functions appear in a right-click menu on the window title bar. If you are still not satisfied, you can even assign keyboard shortcuts of any of these actions!

The two functions of eXtra Buttons that I actually use is Always on Top and Send to Tray Menu. I use Always on Top to keep a small Firefox or VLC window active in the bottom-right corner of my widescreen display. Send to Tray Menu is useful to hide download windows that need to be active, but can stay invisible. This function differs from Send to Tray, which just minimizes the window to the system tray as an icon. Since my system tray is already crowded with icons, I prefer to use Send to Tray Menu instead. This minimizes the window to an entry in the right-click menu of the eXtra Buttons system tray icon. That is, to restore this window I right-click the eXtra Buttons system tray icon and there it is!

Tried with: eXtra Buttons 2.2.3 Beta