[kde-linux] order of System Tray icons

[Duncan]

Pablo Sanchez posted on Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:02:28 -0700 as excerpted:

> On 12/15/2011 07:58 AM, Jerome Yuzyk wrote:
>> 
>> What determines the order of icons in the System Tray?

> From what I've observed, it's when the process places itself in the
> tray.
> 
> Perhaps if you ran a script which serially started the System Tray
> items, you'd get a consistent placement.

Your (PS's) experience agrees with mine -- I think it's order of when the 
app gets it into the tray, as newly started apps always get placed first, 
with older ones sliding down (my systray is vertically oriented) and then 
over to a new column as necessary.

But it's a bit more complex than that.

First, the tray has prefs for always visible, hidden, or "auto" on normal 
tray apps, along with a whole list of kde-built-in services (the ones 
that show up with transparent background line-art icons) that it can 
start in the tray, or not.  The default seems to be "auto", which will 
almost certainly mess up the order as icons appear and disappear based on 
activity, so switching each to to either always visible or (always) 
hidden should help.

Second, as you mentioned, enough is happening at startup, and there's 
enough difference in startup time depending on what is cached vs what has 
to be read in from disk before it starts, that the order may still appear 
to be random.  As you suggested, setting up a script to start things up 
in order, perhaps with a few sleep <s> lines placed between started 
commands to give one time to get its tray icon up before the next item 
starts, should help with that.

FWIW, the order seems pretty consistent here, but that's at least partly 
because I have all items set to always visible (I don't like icons hiding 
on me! =:^), and probably partly due to what I run, as well.  The system-
tray device notifier is always first -- I have only that and the 
notifications icon, which always takes a column to itself, set to run 
from the extra items list.  Next is klipper, a kde system service that's 
not (yet?) in the optional extra systray items list.  Then comes the qt4 
based qmpdclient, the mpd (music player damon) controller I use in kde 
(tho I also use the mpd-now-playing plasmoid from kdelook, based on kde's 
own now-playing plasmoid, but for mpd users, but it's not systray 
based).  Next is the superkaramba icon, as I have a superkaramba theme 
running (plasma is supposed to pickup superkaramba themes and supports 
running them natively, but it never sees this one, so I have to run it in 
superkaramba itself).  Then there's my claws-mail instance, and my claws-
mail-feeds instance.   That's all my regular systray icons.  But I have 
other apps that can run in the systray too, if I configure them to do so, 
and if I have them so configured, when I launch them, they bump all the 
other icons (but for the notifier, which as I said gets its own column, 
for whatever reason) down a notch.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman