ShowHide is a limited Fences Alternative in that it allows you to "Show" or "Hide" your desktop icons. (No "fences" can be created with this, but I always used the show/hide feature WAY more anyway) An Open Source Fences Alternative that aims to recreate the "fences" feature can be found here (still under development): https://github.com/Twometer/NoFences
It was originally hosted on zardssoftware.ml (which is offline now) and can be found in only a few online archives if you know EXACTLY what you're looking for.
The last known version was ShowHide 2.2, which is hosted here: https://github.com/Kudjo-Grand/ShowHide/archive/refs/tags/2.2.zip.
It is a single executable, portable (no dependencies), and has a system tray control panel that allows the user to do several things on a right-click, such as:
- toggle Show/Hide of desktop icons
- choose if it starts with Windows
- select a HotKey that can be used to toggle Show/Hide of desktop icons
- disable/enable ShowHide
Double-clicking the system tray icon will:
- toggle Show/Hide of desktop icons
- change the system tray icon to reflect if icons are currently being Shown or Hidden
Double-clicking a blank spot on the Desktop will also toggle Show/Hide of desktop icons.
If anyone can reverse engineer this excellent work, we can build on it and keep it current and free like it was before. (https://web.archive.org/web/20180516162513/http://zardssoftware.ml:80/)