A decent systray in notionwm

NotionWM may be old, but it’s still a very decent window manager with a window management unseen by any other window manager out there.

One part where it shows its age is the systray integration. There is a systray, but it only works reliably with kde-protocol tray icons.

However, there’s a cure for the lack of systray support: stalonetray.

Prepare NotionWM

I have this in my .notion/cfg_statusbar.cfg

mod_statusbar.create {
    screen=0,
    pos='br',
    fullsize=true,
    systray=true,
    template="%workspace_pager %filler %systray % %shellbar %date",
}

You should have something similiar in your setup already. The important part is that the %systray bit is in the template.

Also, in .notion/cfg_notion.lua you should see dopath("mod_statusbar") somewhere.

Now let’s open .notion/cfg_kludges.cfg and add this block to it:

defwinprop {
   class     = "stalonetray",
   instance  = "stalonetray",
   statusbar = "systray",
}

This will send stalonetray to systray when it is started.

Setup Stalonetray

Well, first install it. Your package manager should have it.

Then create .stalonetrayrc in your home directory and add these entries:

icon_size    16
geometry     1x6
background   "#121212"
grow_gravity W
icon_gravity E
parent_bg    true

How to set this up depends on where you’ve placed your status bar. Mine is at the bottom of the screen and I want systray icons to be placed from right to left. Adjust gravity accordingly.

The geometry and icon_size should fit the statusbar height and should provide enough width for all your icons to fit in. Note that the geometry are icon slots. So 6x1 makes space for 6 icons width and 1 icon high.

You can set a background or set parent_bg to true which essentially makes stalonetray transparent.

And last step is to actually start stalonetray. I’m doing this from my .xsession file:

...
stalonetray &
...
/usr/local/bin/notion

Now start pidgin (gtk) and qtpass (qt) and both icons should piecefully show up next to each other.