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Adds abillity to Show Desktop (Win + D) only for One Monitor! Works exactly like Win + D does plus additional features:
- Shows desktop (minimizes all windows)
- Restores windows to their previous states
- Minimizes all windows if user changed state of any window or one of the windows opened / closed (exactly how Win + D works)
- Minimizes/Restores only windows on specific monitor, remembering their states
Upstream ruzrobert/ShowDesktopOneMonitor has been unmaintained since 2023-10, and its
only published release is the 2019 v1.0 binary, which crashes on Windows 11. This fork
fixes the Windows 11 problems and builds the exe in GitHub Actions.
What is fixed here:
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
RegisterHotKey with MOD_WIN makes Windows swallow the Win key-up, so the Win key stays logically pressed (a later plain D is delivered as Win+D) |
The hot key is detected by a low-level keyboard hook (WH_KEYBOARD_LL) instead; Win down/up always pass through untouched, and only the hot key itself is swallowed |
Modifier state cached in booleans goes stale across Win+L / UAC / Ctrl+Alt+Del, so a plain D press fires "show desktop" after unlocking |
Modifier state is queried live with GetAsyncKeyState on every check |
Win+D could not be intercepted without an extra remapping layer (e.g. AHK), and two hooks fighting each other desync the Win key |
Win+D is taken over natively; no remapping layer needed |
requireAdministrator in the manifest blocks "run at logon" and pops UAC on every start |
Runs as a normal user (asInvoker); no elevation required |
The app was DPI-unaware, so on a mixed-DPI setup Screen.FromPoint / Screen.FromHandle can pick the wrong monitor |
Per-monitor DPI aware (PerMonitorV2) + Windows 10/11 declared in the manifest |
The 2019 release sized its per-monitor state array once at startup and threw IndexOutOfRangeException whenever the monitor count changed |
Uses the current code, which resizes the array on every toggle |
SettingsManager.Save() ran from a finalizer and could kill the process |
Saving moved to ExitThreadCore and guarded |
| On a multi-monitor setup the minimize/restore animation flies to the taskbar button the shell picks - and that button can live on another monitor, so the animation slides sideways across the whole desktop | The shell hook HSHELL_GETMINRECT is answered during our own toggle (MinimizeAnimation.cs), retargeting the animation at the bottom edge of the monitor the toggle runs on, so it always drops vertically inside that screen |
Some windows (Foxmail's main frame is one: owned by a hidden helper window and carrying no WS_EX_APPWINDOW) have no taskbar button at all, so Windows never asks where their animation should go and picks a spot of its own - which reads as the animation sliding sideways. All three levers were measured and are dead: no shell question arrives, ptMinPosition is ignored on Windows 11, and changing another process's window styles is refused with access denied |
Such a window (owner set, no WS_EX_APPWINDOW) is recognised, and a tray switch - No animation without a taskbar button, off by default - makes it pop instead of sliding sideways by setting DWMWA_TRANSITIONS_FORCEDISABLED for that one call. See below for why it is off |
The Windows 11 hook rewrite follows the approach worked out in Jiaqi1017/ShowDesktopOneMonitor (commits 2026-09-07/08, GPL-3.0). Thanks also to ppdng/ShowDesktopOneMonitor for the manifest/DPI work.
Take ShowDesktopOneMonitor.exe from the rolling release:
https://github.com/IamNewHands/ShowDesktopOneMonitor/releases/latest
Every push to master rebuilds it and replaces that single release's asset - there is
only ever one release, and it always holds the newest exe. The Actions tab keeps a full
zip (exe + .exe.config + README) under the ShowDesktopOneMonitor-win11 artifact, in case
you also want the config file.
Requires .NET Framework 4.8 (built into Windows 10 2004+ and Windows 11).
- Put
ShowDesktopOneMonitor.exein a folder you can write to (the diagnostic log lives next to it). - Create a task in Task Scheduler:
- Specify path to ShowDesktopOneMonitor.exe
- Trigger: Run only when user is logged on
- Run with highest privileges is only needed if you want to move the windows of elevated apps; it is not needed for the normal features (see Running as administrator)
- On the Settings tab make sure the task will not be stopped after running longer than some days, for example. Note: program has icon in tray, but unfortunatelly it is invisible, if app is started from Task Scheduler :(
Press Win + D to minimize/restore windows on monitor where cursor is currently on. Win + Shift + D keeps working as well.
The minimize/restore animation always lands on the bottom edge of the monitor the cursor is on: windows drop straight down into the taskbar and grow back up. It never slides sideways onto another monitor (that direction comes from the taskbar button Windows picks, which on a multi-monitor setup can sit on a different screen).
Exception: a window with no taskbar button (Foxmail's main frame, for example) gets whatever animation spot Windows picks, which on a multi-monitor setup reads as the animation sliding sideways. The tray switch No animation without a taskbar button makes such a window pop in and out instead - it is off by default, because on a dual-monitor machine turning it on left the secondary screen not repainting after a toggle, and that cause is not understood yet. Windows with a taskbar button keep the vertical animation.
Middle-click a window's title bar and that window moves to the next monitor
(Screen.AllScreens order, wrapping around after the last one). Size and relative position
are kept, and a maximized window stays maximized on the new monitor - the same idea as
Win + Shift + Arrow.
Only the caption area reacts, so middle-click keeps its normal meaning everywhere else (opening a link in a new tab, closing a tab, autoscroll, paste). With a single monitor nothing is swallowed at all: the click passes through and only a log line is written.
Limitations:
- Apps that draw their own title bar (Chrome, VS Code, ...) only respond in the top strip that matches the system caption height, not across their whole visual title bar.
- A window owned by an elevated process is invisible to a normal-privilege process: Windows does not even hand it the input destined for a higher-integrity window, so that title bar never triggers. Run this app elevated and those windows move too (see below).
Only needed for the elevated-window case above. Either right-click the exe and pick Run as administrator, or tick Run with highest privileges on the Task Scheduler task - a scheduled task starts elevated at logon without a UAC prompt.
Nothing else in the program needs elevation, and an elevated process can touch more of the system, so leave it off if you do not need it.
The app is tray-only: there is deliberately no taskbar button. On Windows 11 a new
tray icon starts hidden - click the ^ chevron next to the clock to find it, or turn it
on under Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Other system tray icons.
The app writes a diagnostic log to log.txt next to the exe (it falls back to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ShowDesktopOneMonitor\log.txt if that folder is not writable; the tray
menu's Open log folder always opens whichever one is in use). It records startup, the tray
icon, the hot key registrations, the SetWindowsHookEx result, every hot key press and how
many key events the hook has seen - enough to tell "the app never started", "the hook is
dead" and "the hook is alive but the combo did not match" apart.
The file is capped at 1 MB: once it would grow past that, its oldest half is dropped, so it never grows without bound.
Write log file in the tray menu switches the log off: while it is unchecked nothing at all is written (not even errors). The state is kept in the settings file and survives a restart; tick it again when you need the log.
For animation problems, the log lists every window it toggles (minimizing: / restoring:
with hwnd, window class and title) and every shell question it answers (MinimizeAnimation:
with the rectangle the shell wanted to use). A window that shows up in minimizing: but has
no matching MinimizeAnimation: line is one Windows never asked about - such a window keeps
the animation direction Windows picks for it. Lines ending in
[no taskbar button: Windows never asks] are the ones classified as having no taskbar button;
with the tray switch on, the same line ends in ..., animation skipped].
dotnet build ShowDesktopOneMonitor/ShowDesktopOneMonitor.csproj -c Release
Only the .NET SDK is required - no Visual Studio and no .NET Framework targeting pack
(the reference assemblies come from the Microsoft.NETFramework.ReferenceAssemblies
package that the SDK adds implicitly for .NET Framework targets).
In core of the project is @FrigoCoder's code: https://github.com/FrigoCoder/FrigoTab His code allows to get list of windows exactly like Alt + Tab does, what was excellent for my task.
Copyright (c) 2019 Robert Ruzin. Licensed under the GPL-3.0 license.