KDE Plasma has 2 kinds of notification area entries. 1. Widgets (klipper, networkmanager, plasma-pa, ...) 2. "tray icons" (VLC, Steam, Telegram, ...) right now they are mixed together. i dont think its a good idea. let me explain. tray icons dont use the "themed icons" of plasma. they ship with own ones who dont feel "native" on plasmas look. next they dont have the "feel" of a notification-area-widget. so they behave other than a user expects in this area. So after all it would be good to separate them in some way *and* give the user an option to "show only notification icons" (or hide tray icons) that shows only plasma notification icons in the plasma bar, but show tray icons when you click on "more" again. Reproducible: Always
Created attachment 98511 [details] seperate them like this to make it easier to find what we try to find
Created attachment 98512 [details] if "hidden" show them in extended view
I agree :-)
and I also propose the possibility to custom order the icons position in both :-)
I like the idea about separating widgets from applications. Custom positioning is not going to happen, as the code is awfully complex and complicating it further isn't a good idea.
(In reply to Kai Uwe Broulik from comment #5) > Custom positioning is not going to happen, as the code is awfully complex > and complicating it further isn't a good idea. +1 other than with KDE SC4, the "tray"-icons dont jump around anymore. so only a few people would use this feature anyways. for the separation of apps and widgets its more like a "known behavior bug". For widgets, if you click on them it will open the widget. For apps this is different - if you click them -> sometimes it will open the app window, sometimes nothing happens, sometimes it will open a menu. take apps like "solaar" (to manage logitech unifying mouses). nothing happens if you leftclick on them in the tray.. so why is it mixed with widgets? its like [KDELOOK&FEEL][NOKDELOOK&FEEL][KDELOOK&FEEL][KDELOOK&FEEL][NOKDELOOK&FEEL] it's clutter and not what a user likes to use
With "Custom positioning" I meant the ability to manually drag around items to re-arrange them. I'm in favor of separating applications (which we don't want in the system tray anyway) and widgets. It's not going to be easy, though, as some indicators like the keyboard layout are technically applications (Status Notifier Items) but are not applications in a traditional sense. An item can assign itself a category, though, and we could just show "Applications" on one side and all the others on the other side. Not sure how well that will work out but I'll experiment a bit - nothing that'll make it into Plasma 5.7 for sure. :)
I'm not sure this makes sense. We can easily provide themed icons for common apps that display tray icons. Other than the (fixable) visual inconsistency, is there any actual problem with intermixing them? I don't see one. Recommend closing WONTFIX and then working to resolve the inconsistent icon issue the way we did for Dropbox, for example. Might just be a matter of adding Plasma-ish tray icons for Steam, Telegram, etc. What do you think, Kai?
Let's keep this ticket open while discussing possible solutions.
Icons are now ordered by category and then alphabetically: https://phabricator.kde.org/D11352 Should we close this ticket?
There are still a few requests from the original request that haven't gotten done: - separate them visually somehow (maybe with a subtle vertical or horizontal separator line?) - provide an option to hide all items from the system tray or all SNIs
True, but with this recent change it was decided (?) that SNI and applets are mixed. Sure, this can be changed, so we can keep this ticket open.
All the apps wind up in the "Application Status" category, no?
This is true only for XEmbed: https://github.com/KDE/plasma-workspace/blob/v5.17.5/xembed-sni-proxy/sniproxy.cpp#L432 But this apps are using deprecated protocol. SNI apps can set any category they want. Looks that "Application Status" is the most popular, but this is not the rule. For example (python only): https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar/blob/1.0.1/lib/solaar/ui/tray.py#L164 https://github.com/search?l=Python&q=AppIndicator3.IndicatorCategory&type=Code At least now tray icon are ordered in a consistent way: https://phabricator.kde.org/D11352 Firstly icons are grouped by category, then sorted by name alphabetically. We can have additional configuration page in System Setting for icons ordering. Options would be something like this: * by category, then alphabetically * by (display?) name alphabetically * SNI first, then plasmoids * manual ordering It is feasible but IMO requires ordering and correct data model on C++ side. Which by confidence is what I plan to do (hopefully) :)
confidence -> coincidence This bug is almost 4 years old, so probably we won't get feedback from reporter. In fact this is a feature request, we can still keep it open, create new one with better description or wait for feedback if user like the new, consistent ordering.
Lovely!
FWIW, as time passes, I find myself wishing for this more. Feels like some organization would really help to make system tray items more predictable. Right now some open a pop-up when clicked, while others open an app or show a menu or do something totally different. Separating the two would make the user feel more in control and provide more confidence, I think.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #17) > FWIW, as time passes, I find myself wishing for this more. Feels like some > organization would really help to make system tray items more predictable. > Right now some open a pop-up when clicked, while others open an app or show > a menu or do something totally different. Separating the two would make the > user feel more in control and provide more confidence, I think. I fully agree. +1 In the end it's about two things: 1) Quickly access the information / destination, i.e. with few clicks as possible and visually at a glance at best 2) Don't become distracted from work by to many icons About 1) A visual separation as proposed in #1 is already an enhancement in my opinion. About 2) Rarely needed tray entries already vanish in a popup, which can be opened by clicking on the "down-arrow". Maybe it's be good to separate those widgets/apps in the popup too? Or to have a second popup?
Please remeber that not all applets have expanded representation. For example "Night Color Control" on click just switches state, there is no popup.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2159
Git commit 5816f1810688b932075e73b7621476fa0725d9af by Nate Graham. Committed on 23/09/2022 at 02:14. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. System Tray: Make Media Player and Notifications applets SystemServices Right now these are marked as ApplicationStatus, which means they appear in the System Tray in the same logical group as app icons from the likes of Steam, Discord, Telegram etc. This is sort of weird since those icons are app status notifiers (SNIs) and focus an app when clicked, while the Media Player and Notifications applets are applets that show a popup when clicked. We have gotten a few user complaints about it feeling weird to have them interspersed. And the Media Player and Notifications applets do show application status, but they don't show status for a single application, which makes them more like system services. And in fact, they are system services--just system services that get their content from applications. So moving them to the System Services category isn't semantically incorrect. Let's do it to improve the grouping here. M +1 -1 applets/mediacontroller/metadata.json M +1 -1 applets/notifications/package/metadata.json https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/commit/5816f1810688b932075e73b7621476fa0725d9af