KDE Architecture - System Tray Docking Protocol

Contents 1 The KDE System Tray Docking Protocol 2 From the application's point of view 3 From the windowmanager's point of view 4 From the docking-container's point of view

[edit] The KDE System Tray Docking Protocol

A tray window is a small window (typically 24x24 pixel) that docks into the system tray in the desktop panel. It usually displays an icon or an animated icon there. The icon serves as representative for the application, similar to a taskbar button, but consumes less screen space.

This page contains just the raw protocol description. More information on the system tray itself and how to use it with KDE applications can be found in the section Components/SystemTrayDocking of this architecture overview.

[edit] From the application's point of view

For the application, a tray window is just another toplevel window with one special property defined. The property is called _KDE_NET_SYSTEM_TRAY_WINDOW_FOR and is of type XA_WINDOW, format 32.

The pure existence of this property indicates that the window manager should treat this window as a tray window. The property value may further define the tray window's main window, i.e. the window the tray window is representing.

The following code can be used to declare a window a tray window:

Invalid language argument, "cppqt3", select one from the list:
actionscript3
ocaml-brief
dcs
cfdg
gnuplot
whitespace
lisp
cpp
xml
ocaml
prolog
reg
diff
css
providex
pixelbender
xpp
applescript
thinbasic
c
d
caddcl
freebasic
lolcode
actionscript
cpp-qt
dos
dot
sas
cmake
winbatch
hq9plus
abap
cadlisp
oobas
delphi
rebol
haskell
ruby
povray
progress
kixtart
purebasic
oberon2
email
groovy
oracle11
pascal
c_mac
lsl2
vbnet
tcl
tsql
make
cppqt
apache
matlab
sql
php-brief
klonec
lua
text
scala
m68k
bf
html4strict
autoit
scilab
autohotkey
sdlbasic
fo
oracle8
glsl
smarty
lscript
robots
io
xorg_conf
typoscript
python
visualfoxpro
nsis
z80
ada
gml
cobol
smalltalk
bibtex
csharp
apt_sources
mirc
po
gdb_backtrace
eiffel
modula3
vb
basic4gl
objc
whois
lotusformulas
genero
java
qbasic
vim
verilog
gettext
mxml
pic16
idl
klonecpp
vhdl
plsql
asm
asp
per
visualprolog
javascript
rails
php
awk
mysql
latex
powershell
locobasic
blitzbasic
erlang
bnf
java5
teraterm
intercal
mpasm
ini
boo
bash
inno
cfm
fortran
rsplus
perl
cil
scheme
lotusscript
avisynth
properties

When the application maps the window with XMapWindow(), the window will dock into a system tray if possible. Undocking is done with either XUnmapWindow() or XDestroyWindow().

[edit] From the windowmanager's point of view

TODO (once it is done)

[edit] From the docking-container's point of view

TODO (once it is done)

Initial Author: Matthias Ettrich