Toggle/Hide some tray icons (feature request - discussion) #212
Description
Hello, and thank you for maintaining this wonderful window manager. It is a sweet feeling having it as my favorite despite the many years of advances (and sometimes retrogresses) of other DEs and WMs. Having said that, there's one specific feature I think that the people from Redmond did good, as it addressed something that had started to bother me before it was introduced back in the 90s: the proliferation of system tray icons for background running applications. I remember seeing the icons list in one of my friends' computer and it was awful: 15 icons next to the clock on a 1024x768 screen.
Let's skip to the modern world. I recently was required to go back to Windows for some time and use several applications. Now I'm back on Linux but the requirement to use those applications is still in effect, and I noticed: "Hey, my tray icons list is much longer than in Windows, and I didn't have that many before. What gives?". Now I understand why. I have more applications creating their own icons there now, and it is a good thing. Those are applications that I use and need to access through my workday but don't require a full window button all the time. It's just that now that RAM is more available I tend to keep more applications and utilities open. Of the top of my head I have: Network manager, Thunderbird/Geary, Orage, Pasystray, Cpufreq, Teams (the unofficial app), Ksnip, qwpgraph, Steam, and I can add many others that don't normally have one thanks to that useful feature from IceWM, like Whatsapp Web, Youtube Music, etc.
The specific issue is that the list of systray icons may keep growing. In the future, I expect that list to have up to 25 icons, if not more, by 2032. Would it be possible to implement a collapsible menu similar to the one in Windows since XP? Or a way to keep some of the icons hidden while not needed? For example, I would move Cpufreq, Ksnip, Qpwgraph and Steam into a collapsible tray, and leave the others where they are now, in the normal tray. It would be fine if there's an alternative solution using other tray apps, but a couple of experiments with Stalonetray and Trayer were... less than optimal.
For now I'll keep working as is, I have enough screen space to allocate to a few more icons anyway. I would like to know your thoughts about this issue, and what other people's experiences are. What icons do you like to keep there? Do you also think there are too many applications creating or using tray icons?
P.D.: I'm sorry to treat this as a forum post. It's just that you mentioned in other threads that this is like a forum, and I don't want to impose my issue as a feature request if it is really a non-issue for you or for most other IceWM users.