GKrellM trayicons For Linux

gkrellm-trayicons is a plugin for gkrellm that displays a variable number of user-defined, automatically scaled icons.

The icons may be used either for notification or as application launchers. The plugin serves a similar purpose to the "system tray" on the Windows taskbar. The notification functionality has been designed to facilitate easy integration into shell scripts and existing applications.

The idea was born few years ago when I was striving to find a simple way to integrate my console-based IRC client (irssi) with my desktop. I needed some kind of a notification when someone had sent me a message or when a friend had joined the IRC network.

For that purpose I created a patch for the icewm window manager. That patch adds a bunch of small icons to the taskbar. The icon may be in one of two states - it's either active or inactive. It's very easy to switch the state of the icons using a set of "activation files".

The icon gets activated whenever an application writes a message to the activation file. Upon activation the icon image changes and the content of the activation file is displayed in a small popup area.

I've never released the patch publicly, thinking it hadn't been generic enough to be useful for other people. Now, few years later, I've decided to try using some other window managers and thus I no longer want to be dependent on features bounded to some particular window manager.

The natural decision was to implement the notification functionality in gkrellm in form of a plugin. Gkrellm is an excellent tool precisely because it allows one to switch window managers freely without losing any of the monitors and controls one is used to.

First you have to configure the plugin. The icons may be in any of the common image formats (PNG, GIF, JPG, XPM). The image size doesn't matter because all the icons are scaled automatically to the size specified in the configuration.

Left click deactivates the icon and runs the associated command. Right click just deactivates the icon. Middle click launches the configuration dialog.