I do all of my development in virtual machines, which has numerous advantages. I've found that I like VM VirtualBox the best for this, and I love supporting free software.
But I can't get any work done without a minimum of two monitors, and I often use three or four. So naturally, my virtual machines all use multiple monitors as well. And since I'm focused entirely on my development work, I run everything maximized, filling my physical screens.
The problem comes when I want to return to my host desktop for whatever reason. VirtualBox treats each virtual monitor as a separate window, so I have to go to the top of each virtual desktop window, find the minimize button, and click it. When I want to restore the windows and get back to work, I have to click on each one individually. It might sound silly, but this wastes quite a bit of my time.
What I'd like to have is some way to minimize and restore all of the virtual desktop windows for a particular virtual machine at one time. Like, as a group. If you ask me, this should be VirtualBox's default behavior, but I haven't found any such option. Am I missing one? Or some kind of hotkey perhaps?
If not, perhaps there's something provided in the operating system that will do this. I'm running Windows 7 and the taskbar already groups all the windows together—is there a way to minimize and/or restore all windows in an application group?
And finally, if there isn't some mechanism built into the OS, can I install some type of extension/utility that will add this feature to Windows? Surely I'm not the first person to want "Minimize All" and "Restore All" options in their context menus…
Edit: I should mention that I already know about keyboard shortcuts like Win+M that minimize all open windows. I don't want that. I have other windows open besides those that belong to VirtualBox. I want those left alone. I want to minimize all open windows belonging to a particular application group, not all of them that are open on the desktop.
Best Answer
You might try to press & hold Shift + Ctrl, then right-click your virtual machine on your taskbar. Select Minimize All, and if you want to restore select Restore All.
You have to use your taskbar for this. So maybe in your case when all VM's are fullscreen you only need to minimize one so that you can use your taskbar :)
Edit: I noticed that when you press shift + ctrl, windows changes your keyboard layout. Check this out if that's also the case for you. Then you may want to change those shortcuts :)