RainMeter doesn't show minimised, so how about this little trick?

[RainDojo]

I got into RM a few months ago after seeing a cool Win10 theme come up on YouTube. I'm stuck on Win10 so I'm happy to spend time making it look better. I admit I need to find time to learn RM but I'm not doing too badly thanks to help from you guys.

Anyway, one thing I found a pain with RainMeter is that if you hide your Taskbar you're fkd because RainMeter doesn't show minimised programs/windows. To get around this I thought to use Nexus simply for it's ability to completely hide the taskbar but show what's minimised and system tray stuff (no need for a dock full of icons).
I did this by choosing the settings in Nexus and replacing the repeatable background image in the Nexus theme to match my RainMeter skin. I then simply dragged Nexus down to my RainMeter skin (at the bottom of my screen) and it works great. I thought this might be of interest.

- The bit in the red border is Nexus, the rest is RainMeter:

Screenshot_5.png

[Yincognito]

Anyway, one thing I found a pain with RainMeter is that if you hide your Taskbar you're fkd because RainMeter doesn't show minimised programs/windows.

Assuming I understood what you meant by this, that only happens if you don't have a skin being active. If you do, you can always right click on it (CTRL + right click if your skin already uses right click for some other action) and access pretty much everything Rainmeter related from the skin's context menu. If such a skin is set to Stay Topmost, then you'll have that possibility at all times too.

[RainDojo]

No, that's not what I meant. Take a look at this for an example:

Screenshot_2.png

On the left I have a RainMeter skin showing my version of a Start button, search, internet and email. To it's right I am using Nexus to show me what's running (Illustrator, Explorer, Chrome, etc). I do this because RainMeter doesn't have a way of letting you know what has been minimised, as such I found myself launching Chrome when it was already running. Using Nexus in this way solves the problem.

[Yincognito]

No, that's not what I meant. Take a look at this for an example:

Screenshot_2.png

On the left I have a RainMeter skin showing my version of a Start button, search, internet and email. To it's right I am using Nexus to show me what's running (Illustrator, Explorer, Chrome, etc). I do this because RainMeter doesn't have a way of letting you know what has been minimised, as such I found myself launching Chrome when it was already running. Using Nexus in this way solves the problem.

Now I see. Yep, that's a good choice, indeed.

For the record, Rainmeter might not have ways to let you know if a window has been minimized, but AutoIt does - take a look at these:
https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?t=21785
https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?t=42450&start=20#p215590
Probably better to have Nexus handling this, but just to show you that it can be done.

[RainDojo]

The bonus with Nexus is it properly hides the Taskbar (no popping up). Thanks for the links though.

[Yincognito]

The bonus with Nexus is it properly hides the Taskbar (no popping up). Thanks for the links though.

Indeed.