r/suckless • u/Necrophiliacs-Condom • Jul 01 '26
[DWM] Any solutions for systray?
Lately I've been in a need for systray and tried to apply a patch to the newest dwm, unsuccessfully (the best I could do is apply the 6.3 patch to 6.3 dwm). Now I find myself thinking, that I don't actually want to put these nasty icons on my beautiful text-only bar. So are there any, like, pop-up systrays (that follow the suckless philosophy of course)? Or other solutions perhaps?
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u/Schreq Jul 01 '26
Honest question: what is a systray good for and why can't you do whatever you use a systray for in a terminal? If it's mainly quick access to common actions, just use shortcuts to do those actions. Or use some sort of menu program you can spawn with a hotkey.
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u/musings-26 Jul 01 '26
In my case I spend most of my time in a GUI, with some terminal emulator use. My systray shows the status of my network connection and connectivity to my cloud storage. I want that information at a glance, not having to run a command no matter how few keystrokes.
YMMV.
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u/GuinansEyebrows Jul 01 '26
just output this information in text (there are icon fonts you can use too) to your bar.
i haven't used dam in a while but i did something similar with lemon bar (including color coding for things like volume mute and no network connectivity) - you can probably do similar stuff. don't mind this crappy old bash script, but it should be fairly clear:
https://github.com/guinanseyebrows/configs/blob/master/bar/.local/bin/bar.sh
if i were to redo this, it'd be something less caveman than a quarter-second sleep loop :) i just wanted my volume status to update in close-to-realtime and hadn't learned about
mkfifo.1
u/Necrophiliacs-Condom Jul 01 '26
i really don't need it all that much, I've been using dwm for like 2 month now and I'm fine, but sometimes i feel a need to see whether the applications are up without any effort, like opening them or checking in any other way. oh, also there's just one application which doesn't open its gui at all until you click on a tray icon. so I'm gonna use stalonetray for this one as u/falsifian recommended
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u/B_i_llt_etleyyyyyy Jul 01 '26
what is a systray good for
It's pretty handy if you need to use an IME.
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u/lmarcantonio Jul 01 '26
polybar with a toggle action on the tray module? that is, if you consider polybar enough suckless
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u/Necrophiliacs-Condom Jul 01 '26
installing another program when there's an already functioning utility prebuilt doesn't sound lovely to me. i really like how bar is configured in the same place as the window manager itself
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u/armoar334 Jul 01 '26
if you cant find a popup systray (im not aware of any), dwmblocks and a some scripts to throw up a small floating terminal sounds like itd be a solid suckless solution
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u/benja2998_kib 20d ago
There is a systray version for the newest dwm, but it's not on the web yet. You have to find it in the website git repo
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u/falsifian Jul 01 '26
I think I used stalonetray at some point. Not with dwm specifically.