ayatana appindicator and plasma6

[betcher]

"I’m using AppIndicator in my application, and when running it in the Plasma 6 environment, tooltips (pop-up messages that appear when hovering over the tray icon) do not show up. In other DEs, everything works fine."

ROSA linux 13, plasma 6.3.3, appindicator 0.5.93

What can I try to do to solve my problem?

[bdantas]

Hi betcher. Did you ever make any progress with this? I'm using AppIndicator and have the same question: How to create and change the text that appears when cursor hovers over the SNI/systray icon?

[betcher]

There’s still no solution for Plasma 6, but in other DEs I’ve tried, it works.

self.ind_app = appindicator.Indicator.new (
   "update-status-indicator",
   green,
   appindicator.IndicatorCategory.SYSTEM_SERVICES)
self.ind_app.set_status (appindicator.IndicatorStatus.ACTIVE)
self.ind_app.set_title(_("Update applet") + ' ' + get_os_name())

In Plasma 6, with this code, there’s neither an error nor a tooltip over the tray icon.

[bdantas]

self.ind_app.set_title(_("Update applet") + ' ' + get_os_name())

Hi betcher. Yes, I discovered that libayatana-appindicator does not specifically support a tooltip property for the systray icons, only what they call a title property (I'm talking here about the GTK-based version of libayatana-appindicator--I have not tinkered with the newer glib-based version). It's up to the different systrays whether or not they display icon's title as a tooltip when hovering over them.

I've recently discovered that systray icons in GNU/Linux are a mess, with many competing standards. One result of this is that some standards have tooltip property and others do not, leaving systray developers in a bit of a bind. I found this post very helpful: LBCrion/sfwbar#391 (comment)

For the specific systray I was using, I asked the developer to please use SNI icons' title as tooltip when tooltip property is undefined. Developer did so and now it works: LBCrion/sfwbar#386

In fluxbox I noticed the same thing you noticed in Plasma 6: Neither error nor tooltip over the try icon. I don't think this is ayatana's fault--I think the problem is that the fluxbox and Plasma 6 systrays are hardwired to look only for a tooltip property, which ayatana SNIs don't have.

You could try doing what I did for sfwbar: Ask the Plasma 6 developers to display title when hovering over systray icons that do not have a tooltip property defined.

[bdantas]

in other DEs I’ve tried, it works.

For those DEs with full support for ayatana appindicators, you may find this to be a convenient little daemon: https://github.com/Consolatis/AppIndicator-Broker

[betcher]

Thanks for sharing this!
That daemon looks like a clever fix — I’ll give it a try.
Really appreciate the pointer!

[temaps]

https://abf.io/import/libayatana-appindicator/blob/3f9400ef88/0002-Add-ToolTip-D-Bus-property-for-KDE-Plasma-6-compatib.patch
Usage example:
https://abf.io/import/libayatana-appindicator/blob/rosa2023.1/simple-client-python.py