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

[Éric Tremblay]

On 09/08/15 15:00, Eike Hein wrote:
> Tray icons are not delegates for specific windows. KDE apps don't
> minimize to the tray (though some will keep running and display a
> status notifier item in the tray area even when all windows are
> closed).
>

Exactly, they are delegates for specific *processes*, or in certain 
cases groups of processes. My proposal just lets the window manager know 
which window(s) match up with a given icon, and where this icon is 
located on the screen.

It's then the window manager's job to decide if and when to do an 
open/close animation to the tray/indicator/notify icon. It's as simple 
as that. If a window manager doesn't want to implement this feature, it 
can just ignore the information. It's also not limited to tray icons: 
for example, a clock applet can add an icon entry that matches the 
actual clock display to its own configuration window(s), either by PID 
or by class name. The window manager would then animate to/from the 
clock when the user opens or closes the clock's configuration window.

It doesn't get in the way of anything, consumes nearly zero resources, 
but it can be very useful for window managers that do want to implement 
such features. Like i said, i've been running my own implementation of 
this in Xfce for a few months on two of my computers, and it works very 
nicely.