Easily hide and show (unmap and map) X11 windows.
I wrote the shell scripts first, using xdotool as my interface with the X server. Later, because I was having a hard time finding C projects that hadn't been done yet, I 'ported' the shell scripts into K&R C.
I recommend binding these programs to keyboard shortcuts, as they operate on whichever window currently has focus.
These are what you should use if you have xdotool and bash and GNU sed.
The hiding script doesn't require any of those but xdotool, but the unhiding
script requires bash and GNU sed. You can probably replace those with other
tools or options in exotic linuxes/unixes, but I was targeting my personal
Debian machine.
If you want something that will work on basically any POSIX OS, try the C programs. You only need libxcb's headers and library for them to work.
(Update: 2017: for some reason, the C programs don't work on my 64 bitlaptop with Intel graphics. I'm probably doing something wrong with the X11 protocol or making bad assumptions. It was an early C program I wrote, just to try to do it, so I'm not too concerned with fixing it right now.
The shell scripts still work fine, so I recommend using those. I have no idea exactly why the C programs broke, and I don't have time to mess with them at the moment.)
The C Programs: I chose K&R C because I happened to have a book written in 1989 on C handy. The book is called "Programming in C: Revised Edition" By Stephen Kochan. It covers K&R C for most of the book, and then has an appendix of the then-recent ANSI C standard's differences. I believe I used only K&R C in this program, but I wrote it months ago so I may have forgotten something. Anyway, K&R is what I learned C in.
It should compile on basically any C compiler as long as you
have a POSIX system. By replacing the check for a file's existance
with access() and the code to find the path of the user's home directory
(which uses getpwuid()), you can probably even make this code compile in
Windows for use with XMing (a Win32 X11 server). I tried to avoid any
external libraries where possible, so it is highly portable.
To compile, run ./compile.sh from the root of the repository.