A collection of resources related to the status/support of Status Icons (aka System Tray, Notification Area, Top Icons, App Indicators) in GNOME.
- Status Icons and GNOME
- The official why not. Worths a read.
- Blog post by a core member of the GNOME Design Team.
- I want to… section in Is Linux about SysTray?
- A collection of common use cases (otherwise covered by a StatusIcon) with recommended alternative.
- Intended for application developers.
- Extensions supporting GNOME Shell 40:
- KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support (depends on
libappindicator) - Tray Icons Reloaded
- Unite Shell
- KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support (depends on
- Status Icon Migration FAQ
- Also check Notifications and its predecessor Message Tray.
- How to design a status icon library in 2019
- Evaluation of options from a developer perspective.
- Some uses cases that might not fit well in Notifications model:
related threads in this forum:
- Dynamic icon in top panel
- How to add custom icons to Gnome shell tray in Wayland environment
- AppIndicator support in GNOME 3
other resources I found enlightening:
- Telegram Desktop issues #3830 and #3831
- Ayatana Indicators
I’m writing this both for the community and for me. My motivation sparked after reading GNOME/gnome-shell-extensions#321.
That bug might well be bread and butter of FLOSS developers. Some random user in the internet requesting a feature and turning hostile after 5 messages. I’m empathetic to the developers and bug triagers.
On the other hand, I see the ¿perceived? increase of this hostile-type issues a natural consequence of the wider exposure to development process brought by gitlab/discourse. And wider exposure has a positive balance IMHO.
After reading the following comment:
The failed “system tray” concept has been discussed many many many many times before in the last 10 years.
I told to myself “let’s look for it” and thus this post. Hoping this get more exposure and reach users before they reach gitlab.