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UniDesktop

StatusNotifierItem (SNI)

The Linux system-tray protocol used on GNOME, KDE, XFCE and every freedesktop-compliant Wayland compositor. UDA implements it in crates/uda-platform-linux/src/tray.rs.

Registration order

Section titled “Registration order”

The watcher must exist before the item announces itself, otherwise the shell never notices it:

  1. Connect to the session bus and own a unique well-known name (org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-<app>-<pid>-<n>).
  2. Export the item object at /StatusNotifierItem and the menu at /MenuBar.
  3. Call RegisterStatusNotifierItem on org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher (falling back to org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierWatcher).

A missing watcher is not fatal — the item stays exported, so a watcher that starts later can still find it through NameOwnerChanged.

Item interface

Section titled “Item interface”
Member Direction Payload
Activate(x, y) shell → item primary click
SecondaryActivate(x, y) shell → item middle click
ContextMenu(x, y) shell → item dbusmenu carries the geometry, so UDA only logs it
Scroll(delta, orientation) shell → item no cross-platform event, logged only
ProvideXDGActivationToken(token) shell → item Wayland handshake, accepted and discarded
Category item → shell always ApplicationStatus
Id item → shell the registered application name
Title item → shell tooltip title line
ToolTip item → shell (icon name, icon pixmap, title, description)
Status item → shell Active when visible, Passive when hidden
ItemIsMenu item → shell always false — Activate fires events, not a menu
Menu item → shell the object path of the dbusmenu implementation
NewStatus / NewIcon / NewTitle item → shell (signal) emitted only for the field that changed

Icon byte order

Section titled “Icon byte order”

IconPixmap is typed a(iiay) and documented as “ARGB32 rows”, which in practice means byte order B, G, R, A — not A, R, G, B. Writing the channels as A, R, G, B swaps red and blue, so a red icon arrives blue.

Rows are also bottom-up: source row 0 lands at the end of the destination buffer, and stride padding is skipped rather than copied.

A Path value is interpreted as a freedesktop icon-theme name, not a filesystem path. That is why the Python and Node.js SDKs decode a PNG into RGBA and submit pixels instead of handing over a path.

Double click

Section titled “Double click”

SNI has no double-click signal. UDA synthesises one from two Activate calls inside a 500 ms window — the same window as Windows’ GetDoubleClickTime() — and deliberately does not advertise TRAY_DOUBLE_CLICK, because claiming a capability the protocol cannot deliver would break the honest-capability contract.

The window always restarts on each click, so a triple click reads as click-then-double rather than one long double.

See also

Section titled “See also”