I want to hide all the running windows using python

Question

I'm creating this program only for windows. I want an effect like win+d. I want an application that when i open it, it will hide(minimize) all windows and show the desktop. I used pygetwindow library but i can't filter the core windows. I have 3 windows open but when i get the windows using the function it returns around 15. So I couldn't make just a loop and minimize all windows.

import time
import pygetwindow as gw

def hide():
    windows = gw.getAllWindows()
    for window in windows:
        if not window.is_system:
            window.minimize()
    time.sleep(3)
    return True

print(hide())
print(gw.getAllTitles())

Here is my code. The getAllTitles function return like Windows Program Manager, Cortana, or even empty names. Also I don't want to use pyautogui to just click 'win+d'. Thank you for your help :)

Answer 1

You can use ctypes to retrive the windows title and hwnd that are not part of the system and use them with Win32Window class from pygetwindow.

import ctypes
from ctypes import wintypes
import pygetwindow as pgw

# Define necessary WinAPI structures and constants
user32 = ctypes.windll.user32
kernel32 = ctypes.windll.kernel32

EnumWindowsProc = ctypes.WINFUNCTYPE(ctypes.c_bool, wintypes.HWND, wintypes.LPARAM)
GetWindowTextLength = user32.GetWindowTextLengthW
GetWindowText = user32.GetWindowTextW
IsWindowVisible = user32.IsWindowVisible
EnumWindows = user32.EnumWindows

# Buffer length for window title
nChars = 256

# List to store the results
windows = []

# Function to enumerate windows
def enum_windows_proc(hwnd, lParam):
    if IsWindowVisible(hwnd):
        length = GetWindowTextLength(hwnd)
        if length > 0:
            buff = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(nChars)
            GetWindowText(hwnd, buff, nChars)
            windows.append((hwnd, buff.value))
    return True

def get_windows_list():
    EnumWindows(EnumWindowsProc(enum_windows_proc), 0)
    return windows

def minimize_all():
    window_list = get_windows_list()
    for hwnd, title in window_list:
        # Use the provided hwnd
        window = pgw.Win32Window(hwnd)
        window.minimize()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    minimize_all()