A good system tray application for Windowmaker window manager
Eureka!
I mean, I found it! I complained a lot about lack of system tray app for Windowmaker. Sure, system tray is too KDE or Gnomish stuff, Windowmaker has completely different paradigm, but there are applications I want to use (I love liferea, claws-mail and basket!) which can not interact with Windowmaker to create notification icons like, eg. Psi does. There are two dockapps intended to be a system tray containers: wmDockApp which was very buggy, but became more stable with a couple dirty hacks, and Docker which works perfectly in OpenBox (which it was written to) but behaves awfully under my favorite window manager. I was almost going to try to fix one of theme (or maybe merge them as they seem to have different problems), when I decided to find an alternative to Windowmaker. Finally I found trayer which is a part of fvwm-crystal.
I had to say good bye to FVWM, because I need to work, not spend weeks on tuning (possibly, I'll get back to it later, I liked it's flexibility and power), but the trayer stayed on my PC for a long time. It's simple, it's working, it's not limited to 4 icons like Docker and wmDockApp do, and it's easily configurable. There's what mine looks like:

And there's how I launch it:
There are 3 reasons why trayer is not really perfect system tray app:
- it is configurable only through command-line arguments. Yes, it's okay for us, geeks, but if it could store settings in /.trayer or /.config/trayer I'll be happier.
- it is static: you can't drag it with mouse and stick to another screen edge, you can't resize it, you can't chage it's color without killing it and starting again with new arguments
- it doesn't look like a part of Windowmaker :)
Stay tuned, and I'll post a couple more articles on windowmaker, GNUStep, and etoile soon.
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Filed under: desktop Tags:
windowmaker,
linux,
system tray,
trayer
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wombat
Thanks a lot for this post. i was looking for good replacement for wmsystray.
01.06.2007 // 21:22 [ Link : Reply ]