Tray-Icons-Reloaded VS Hardcode-Tray

Tray Icons Reloaded

"It only works with Xorg and XWayland."

I use https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/ and put the limit to one, then I don't see any icons except three dots which then shows my icons when I click on it in an overflow, like https://github.com/MartinPL/Tray-Icons-Reloaded/blob/master/.github/overflow.png

- Tray Icons Reloaded: https://github.com/MartinPL/Tray-Icons-Reloaded

I also change a few things using GNOME Tweaks; namely setting the application theme to Orchis-grey-dark-compact (https://github.com/vinceliuice/Orchis-theme), icon theme to Flatery-Dark (https://github.com/cbrnix/Flatery) and system font to Inter (https://rsms.me/inter/).

I've been using this setup for quite a while and I've been very happy with my computing experience, both in terms of aesthetics and overall UX. I tried tiling WMs for a while (first KWin and then i3 / Sway) but I found that I'm just a messy person who tends to be more productive with a floating WM.

This can fix a lot of icons. Last time I installed it from aur, it couldn't fix some of the icons. Compiling from source fixed the issue though.

I'd say it not so hard to keep icons intact. How many tray apps do you have? Five? Maybe ten? You can write a script using HardcodeTray to override the icons for every app in the list. And if you like zero click solution, you can make a hook for your package manager to overwrite the hardcoded icons on updates. The only thing that's left is to keep overrides list up to date. Doesn't take that much of an effort to do so.

As mentioned above, the Discord desktop app uses some hardcoded 24x24 tray icons which look horrible at any sane screen resolution. Things like Hardcode-Tray exist, but don't work out of the box with NixOS as far as I can tell, so I made a home-manager activation script for it. It's not perfect by any means, but it seems to work well enough.

As for the system tray, it's a little bit harder than that. If you are lucky, your app may have settings to configure tray icon (e.g. pidgin). In some cases icon is compiled into a binary. If you still want to change a tray icon there is a solution that modifies a binary. The drawback is that modification will be rolled back on package update. The best way is to combine your overrides into a script and run it after update.

Maybe using https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/Hardcode-Tray

This Hardcode-Tray works fine for known (and / or old (not changed) structured) apps like Skype or MegaSync. But it's a good start to understand what's needed for this particular case. So, thanks a lot again for the hint and ref!

You can use this script to change the Telegram app tray and other apps as well (https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/Hardcode-Tray)