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.