Minimize to tray feature for arbitrary app

dion · January 4, 2025, 1:12pm

Something similar to KDocker. KDocker still can be used (by forcing X11), but it’s fragile.

Requirements:

Should work on Plasma Wayland out of the box (without extra third-party scripts/hacks). Adding ‘KWin’ rule is fine
No ‘support’ from app itself. It should be possible to apply this for any app like KCalc or firefox. All apps including non-Qt. I think it’s fine to have it for Wayland apps only but I don’t see why X11 apps can’t work same way. But no need to support X11 session (Kdocker still works)
Minimized app has no Task Manager icon. When app is restored – I don’t care. I think that restored app should have task manger icon (unless ‘Skip taskbar’ quirk is applied)
Popup menu may just show usual window decoration items.
Ability to assign global hotkey to restore app (if it’s standard StatusNotifierItem then it already can be scripted).
Huge plus: ability to change item visibility in usual tray settings including ‘requires attention’ feature.
Huge plus: catch “close window” button/shortcut and minimize to tray instead.

Possible implementation:

KWin rule like ‘Skip Taskbar’

Less ideal implementations but still better than nothing: add second ‘Icon only Task Manager’ to panel and somehow configure it to show only such special windows. It could be any of:

Windows tagging and hiding
- KWin rule to ‘tag’ window somehow
- Task manager option to show only ‘tagged’ windows
Task manger option to show only ‘Pinned’ apps and at the same time option to "never show apps pinned by other task manager (or make it default)

I’ve found multiple discussions about this:

I can offer $100 USD for KDocker-like solution that requires certain manual actions (like extra KWin/shell script that can be installed to $HOME, or launching app via ‘wrapper’ that have no performance impact). But without patching/rebuilding Plasma source.

Or $200 for fully out of the box experience with StatusNotifierItem and controlled visibility