I have set up a shortcut “Activate System Tray Widget”:
System Settings > Workspace > Shortcuts > Shortcuts > System Settings > Plasma > Activate System Tray Widget
When I press this shortcut, I see the following, with the focus on “IBus Panel” icon.
I want, from this position, to be able to easily navigate via keyboard to “Notifications” widget (the first icon in the System Tray on the left) and to “Media Player” widget (the icon to the left of Audio Volume and Bluetooth widgets). That is, to have navigation between the “activated” “Status and Notifications” panel and the System Tray itself.
As far as I can tell, there is no regular keyboard navigation from the panel of big icons (above thick blue line on the screenshot) down to the panel of small icons (below the line). By “regular keyboard navigation” I mean pressing arrow keys and Tab ↹ to move focus.
It feels silly to me that the shortcut “Activate System Tray Widget” a) gives easy access to all the hidden System Tray icons (which are in the top panel on the screenshot, from “IBus Panel” to “Printers”) but b) does not have any way to navigate to the shown System Tray icons. The shown System Tray icons are more important to the user, it feels more correct to me to have easier access to them. Either I am missing something, or this ought to be turned into a feature request on bugs.kde.org.
An alternative solution is:
- ignore the shortcut “Activate System Tray Widget” altogether
- press shortcut “Move keyboard focus between panels” (default is Meta+Alt+P).
- press arrow keys multiple times to move focus to the System Tray. // This depends on the layout. In my setup:
- the focus after first pressing of “Move keyboard focus between panels” is on the Application Launcher (Kickoff)
- the Plasma panel is at the bottom
- System Tray is third to last on the right.
- I need to press left arrow key ← four times to land on
en, which is the icon of Keyboard Layout widget. It is faster to wrap around from the left side, than to press right arrow key. It takes 19 → presses (with the current amount of virtual desktops (9), opened applications, and other widgets on the panel) to land on the icon of the Notifications widget.
P.S. I picked this idea up after trying WinKey+A shortcut in Windows 11, where the System Tray is now divided into two parts: per-app part and system part. The system part is called “Quick Settings”. There, all icons shown in the system tray have corresponding big widgets when the big panel is opened: on the screenshot (ignore the big green arrow pointing to the media controls) there are three icons: network (wifi), volume, and battery, each of which have big widget on the panel above: the big blue buttons for network (with blurred network name) in the top left corner, volume widget with big slider at the bottom, and disabled battery button on the left below wifi.