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Lock gohide with a PIN

Hiding your windows is only half of privacy. If anyone who walks up to your desk can open gohide, click Show all, and read your rules — or simply quit gohide and watch everything reappear — then the hiding was never really yours to control.

gohide Pro closes that gap two ways: a PIN on the Settings window, and the option to make gohide itself invisible.

A PIN on Settings

  1. Open Settings → PIN lock.
  2. Click Set PIN…, enter it twice.
  3. Tick Require the PIN to open Settings.

From then on, opening Settings asks for the PIN first. Someone who grabs your mouse can't change which apps are managed, can't reassign your hotkeys, can't turn off the privacy cover, and can't quit gohide from the Settings window.

What the PIN deliberately does not lock

The PIN guards Settings and nothing else. It does not sit in front of hide-all or restore-all.

That's a deliberate choice. The whole value of a panic restore is that it is instant — the moment you need your windows back, you need them back now, not after typing a code. A PIN prompt in that path would make gohide slower exactly when speed is the entire point. So your own hide and restore hotkeys stay immediate, and the PIN protects the thing that actually needs protecting: your configuration.

If you forget the PIN

The PIN is a privacy gate against the person standing next to you, not disk encryption. Two things stay true no matter what:

  • Quitting gohide from the tray always restores your hidden windows — with no PIN. gohide never leaves a window stranded, even when it's being shut down.
  • Deleting %APPDATA%\gohide\config.dat clears the PIN — along with the rest of your saved settings, which you would then set up again.

Making gohide itself invisible

A gohide window sitting on the taskbar is its own kind of tell. Under Settings → Startup you can:

  • Hide gohide after it starts — gohide comes up with no window at all.
  • Also hide its notification-area icon — nothing on screen suggests gohide is running.

To bring it back, use the Show gohide hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+G by default). Launching gohide again also summons the running copy instead of starting a second one.

gohide refuses to strand you: it only hides its own tray icon when a working "Show gohide" hotkey is actually registered. If that hotkey is missing or taken by another program, the icon stays put, so there is always a way back.

Pair this with autostart and gohide simply isn't there — until you ask for it.

Free vs Pro

Hiding windows, taskbar buttons and tray icons with hotkeys is free for up to 5 apps — download gohide. The PIN lock, startup stealth, the privacy cover, mouse and hot-corner triggers, process suspend and unlimited apps are part of gohide Pro — a one-time purchase, no subscription. See pricing.