# System Tray

The system tray, aka notification area, is the area on the right or bottom of the Windows&tm;task bar which shows small icons related to running programs. It is common that double clicking the icon will bring the corresponding application to the front, or pop up some dialog related to the application. Most of the time, right clicking such an icon pops up a menu of frequently used commands to ask the application to perform.

You can send any running instance of Notepad++ to the system tray:

- at startup, by using the -systemtray command line switch
- Using the minimise button, if you enabled this behaviour from the Preferences dialog.

If you try to minimise a running instance of Notepad++ to the system tray while one is already there, the new instance will be minimised in the standard way, so that its button remains on the task bar.