Crate hide_console_ng 

This is a zero-dependency (implicitly depends on win32 via windows-bindgen) library to achieve multi-subsystem single executable programs on Windows.

The method used in this library will flash a console for a brief period, but otherwise this will allow you to create an application with both GUI and CLI codepaths.

Motivating example:

// Optionally specify at the top of "main.rs" ("console" is default)
#![windows_subsystem = "console"]

let is_gui = true; // parse arguments and determine console/windowed mode
if (is_gui) {
    #[cfg(windows)]
    hide_console_ng::hide_console();
}
// continue with your application

This example allows to run GUI application and hide a console depending on if application was started from console or from Windows GUI Shell.

This is done by detecting if our app parent process is “explorer.exe”.

The behaviour resembles how many Linux desktops will run an app from desktop shortcuts without attaching a console, but if you run an executable from terminal it will keep connected to parent shell’s stdout/stdin.

This also is beneficial since text selection in console can pause the execution of main thread on Windows, which is undesirable for GUI application.

This library fails to compile on non-windows targets, to encourage use of conditional dependencies in Cargo.toml:

[target.'cfg(windows)'.dependencies]
hide_console_ng = "0"

Additionally show_unconditionally and hide_unconditionally is provided for completeness.

Functions

hide_console

Hide console if an app is started via explorer.exe

hide_unconditionally

Hide console even if parent process is not Explorer

show_unconditionally

Show console