- Clicking it
For active->inactive:
- Moving to the application's close button
- Clicking
This is both a more complicated process, but more importantly, a more inconsistent one, since the processes to show and hide the windows have virtually nothing in common.
That said, I'm not sure if the application bucket is the right solution to this. This interaction is precisely how the task list works, however:
- The notification area is nice because it's (hopefully) for commonly used applications
- The notication area shows icons, which visually can be scanned much faster, and take up much less space on the panel than a text-based task-bar
- The notification area typically has only one icon for the entire application, whereas each window in a multi-window application shows up in the task bar
- The notification area icons show up regardless of what workspace you're on, whereas the task bar only shows the current workspace's tasks
In a perfect world then, the task bar would provide a way for a window to be:
- Sticky when minimized
- Icon-only, without text
- "Favorited", so it shows up based on the above rules.
That doesn't sound too complicated implementation-wise, but (for me) would make the behavior of these "toggled" applications much more consistent with the regular task-manager UI.