Proposal: clean way of animating windows to/from system tray icons

Tue Sep 8 10:38:21 PDT 2015

In the Windows world, system tray icons were used for long running
applications where putting them in the taskbar was considered "too heavy",
like IM clients and music players. This was ultimately seen as a poor
design for the taskbar which has been since fixed in Windows.

I see no reason to carry this over into free desktop DEs.

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015, 1:48 AM Philipp A. <flying-sheep at web.de> wrote:

> i don’t think that X11-only solutions make sense in 2015, with wayland
> implemented in the big DEs and just waiting for a bit more polish and
> testing.
>
> and the notification area isn’t where stuff gets minimized to – that’s the
> task bar. what are the advantages of deviating from this thing that *all*
> applications can do, and do something else instead? are a launcher/taskbar
> entry with quicklist, counter, progressbar, and dynamic interaction via
> MPRIS and a independent notification icon not enough for your application?
>
> the only similar thing i can think of is that task icons are often able to
> launch programs (e.g. the printer notification icon can launch a printer
> config dialog, and the update notification a system updater), so maybe it
> would make sense to tell WMs where some application launched from, maybe
> also generalized: clicked it in a panel menu? launched from the window menu
> of another application? notification area? task bar? “WM, please create
> this window with a launch animation coming from this rectangle”
>
> best, philipp
>
> Éric Tremblay <xdg at deimos.ca> schrieb am Di., 8. Sep. 2015 um 00:40 Uhr:
>
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I'm programming little "zoom" animations in XFCE to show the user in a
>> logical way, for example, where to click to get a window back when it
>> minimizes, or where a window "comes from" when it appears, if that
>> applies. The biggest problem with this is that there's no standard way
>> for the different processes (window manager, tray icon manager(s), etc)
>> to determine or communicate with each other where the *tray icons* are.
>>
>> Taking example of the _NET_WM_ICON_GEOMETRY window property, i think
>> i've come up with a clean, simple, and reliable solution. Here's a
>> description of how i implemented this in XFCE, however i attempted to
>> make it as portable and non-wm-specific as possible, depending only on
>> X11/Xlib internals.
>>
>> I'm simply using an X property on the root window of the display called
>> _NET_WM_TRAY_ICON_GEOMETRIES which follows a simple format. It's an
>> array of strings, with each string representing a tray icon, and
>> following a format like:
>>
>> "mgr=systray,classname=blueman,pid=4522,x=1332,y=1,w=22,h=22"
>>
>> In this example, the "mgr" field indcates that this entry was added by
>> the "systray" pluign. This information lets more than one "tray" process
>> manage the string array on a given X display (as is the case with XFCE's
>> "systray" (aka "notify") and "indicator" panel plugins) and also avoids
>> the problem where different processes would add duplicate information,
>> whcih would quickly saturate the string array. The "classname" field is
>> pretty self-explanatory, it's the class name of whatever window(s) match
>> up with this systray icon. The "pid" field can help in matching windows
>> that have nonexistent or weird class names. If it's absent or equal to
>> -1, then that means the PID of the process owning the icon couldn't be
>> determined. Finally we have the x,y,w,h screen coordinates of this tray
>> icon. In my implementation the fields may be read in any order, but it's
>> better to write them in a more consistent format such as the above.
>>
>> (at least for now) If a string contains any semicolon ";" or newline
>> characters, these should be treated as separating the entry into several
>> entries.
>>
>> Upon creating a new systray icon, modifying an existing one, or deleting
>> a systray icon, a tray manager process such as the "indicator" plugin
>> would do something like the following:
>>
>>      - choose a name that preferably describes its process name, such as
>> "indicator", "notify", or "systray" - this would be the "mgr" field. It
>> should be consistent for the entire lifespan of the tray manager process.
>>
>>      - grab the X server to avoid race conditions with other tray managers
>>
>>      - fetch the strings from the _NET_WM_TRAY_ICON_GEOMETRIES property
>> on the X server's root window
>>
>>      - *remove* all entries whose "mgr" field matches its own chosen
>> process name
>>
>>      - for each tray icon managed by this process: append a string to
>> the array in the above format, omitting the "pid" field or setting it to
>> -1 if the PID corresponding to the tray icon can't be determined, and
>> omitting the "classname" field or setting it to zero-length if the class
>> name can't be determined. If both can't be determined for a specific
>> entry, it's pretty useless to add that entry.
>>
>>      - write the string array to the _NET_WM_TRAY_ICON_GEOMETRIES
>> property on the X server's root window
>>
>>      - ungrab the X server
>>
>>
>> The window manager can then easily determine if it should perform an
>> animation to/from a tray icon when a window opens or closes, and if so,
>> what the screen coordinates of this icon are. In case both a
>> _NET_WM_ICON_GEOMETRY is present *and* a match in the root window's
>> _NET_WM_TRAY_ICON_GEOMETRIES array is found, it's up to the window
>> manager to determine which one should take precedence, based on factors
>> such as the window's class/role, whether it is itself the window's
>> owner, and so on. In some cases, it's also desirable to not perform the
>> animation, for example if there are several open windows matching the
>> same tray icon - in this case, we'd normally want to animate only the
>> last one to close.
>>
>> It's also possible to setup a table of "equivalent names" for processes,
>> for example we'd want pavucontrol windows (the PulseAudio volume
>> control) to be considered as belonging to the indicator-sound-service
>> process if it's running.
>>
>> Anyway, i've been running my implementation of this on 2 of my own
>> machines for a while now, and it seems to work very well.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>    - Éric "delt" Tremblay.
>>
>>
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