If you’re like most people, you probably have a few windows open at startup, including your favorite web browser and email client. But what if you want to keep one or more of those windows closed while you work? That’s easy - just use a command line window manager like GNOME or KDE, and hide the ones that are open by default.
There’s a really useful utility that you can use called Hidden Start (hstart), which will start up a command line application hidden in the background, which eliminates the flashing window.
If you launch the utility with no parameters, it will pop up the settings dialog.
When using this utility, there are three key things to remember: Use the /NOWINDOW parameter to keep the window hidden, use the /D=path argument to make sure that the current directory is set correctly, and make sure to surround your application argument with quotes.
For instance, if I had a batch file stored in c:\scripts\mybatch.bat, I would start it by using the following parameters in my shortcut:
You’ll probably want to copy hstart.exe into somewhere in the system path, for instance C:\windows might work nicely.
Download Hidden Start (hstart)
