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Is this an elephant in the kitchen?

Several important applications do minimisation to the systray (kmail, akregator, amarok etc). From the systray certain operations are accessible via a right click; status information is displayed directly on the icon and the application can be restored by left click. It is a nice functionality I would not want to be without.

However this means there are two ways of exposing and hiding an applications main window and this can just get plain confusing. To minimise to the systray you use the close window button! Without thinking I start to expect this behaviour from other applications that don't have it (resulting in accidentally closing applications).

The other issue with minimising to the systray is that I can have a single application appearing in three separate places on my screen: the application window, task-bar and systray. It is too much. It is unnesessary, confusing clutter.


To be honest I feel minimising to the systray is a bit of a kludge. Although I like the function it brings. What I would really like to see is:

1. A single method for minimising and restoring programs
2. A single place that programs are minimised to
3. A single paradigm for accessing some functions from minimised applications

Perhaps minimised applications in the task bar could actually display a compact UI instead of the current icon + name. I guess itunes and wm player under windows spring to mind as examples (sorry).

Perhaps minimised applications just need a menu associated with them that can be accessed by right click or make the task-bar button a combined button + pulldown.

Thanks for your thoughts.

For those apps, when you close them for firs time, you get a warning about being places in system tray.

Anyway, a new good implementation on taskbar would be very welcome, because since first versions it hasn't changed a lot (it got some fancy effects, but no functional change). Take a look Mac dock. I don't want to get an exact copy of that, but I believe we are really capable to create something really useful and cool Ant the coolest part, that windowz cant copy that until win8

> Take a look Mac dock.

Yeah... has some good points:
- one icon to launch, provide (limited) application feedback and (limited) application interaction.
- it looks good in the shop

I would hope KDE could do a lot better. Here is a quick, very rough idea:


* Launching an application (or dragging it onto the panel) dynamically creates an application plasmoid... well lets call it an application widget in some new enhanced task-bar.
* Once in the task-bar it can be "pinned" there so that it always appears in the task-bar even when the application is not running.
* Clicking the widget or dragging files onto it launches the app or restores the app if it is already open.
* If multiple instances of the app are open click to show them all like a folder-view (along with a spacial "New" entry).
* The "aware" app provides a list of functions which should be made accessible by right-click on the widget; for backward compatability a default list with entries like "open", "open with...", " and "quit" could be provided.
* The "aware" app provides a UI description for the widget - eg for things like "mini media players".
* The "aware" app also channels status information to the widget for display even when the application is minimised.

I wonder if the above really needs as much rewriting of the application
as it sounds. The WM is already able to determine when an application
has a pending dialog or new child window; KDE API calls are used to
update status info; available functions can be listed in meta-files and
invoked via dbus calls; probably the same can be done with the UI
description.

Among other things the above would make interacting with plasmoids and
applications in the panel more similar, hopefully creating a more
cohesive user experience.

Importantly, task-bar icons become applets that can provide mini interfaces.

Personally I'm completely over the current start + task-bar concept
(which dates to windows95). Minimise to systray has tangible advantages
but does break from the desktop model in an uncomfortable way and
creates too many representations for the one application. Quick-launch
icons have the same issue (too many simultaneous representations of the
same application).

Thanks for reading

I suppose the best solution will be use new window atom(X11). Menu having this atom set will be displayed when user click this tray icon. It also can be displayed when user click app icon on Window Caption(called also Title Bar).

You must know KDE already allows to choose minimize to systray option on shortcut dialog.

Could you add mockups or screenshots so anyone could get great picture?