Support notification badge numbers on icons in Icons-Only Task Manager

Brainstorm
1

Currently, the Icons-Only Task Manager in KDE Plasma 6 does not consistently show notification badge numbers (e.g., unread messages, new notifications) on application icons. It would be highly useful to have support for badge overlays similar to those in macOS or GNOME, especially for communication apps like Telegram, WhatsApp (via browser), Discord, etc.

This feature would enhance usability and user awareness by showing relevant counts (unread messages, pending tasks) directly on pinned app icons, reducing the need to open each app to check manually.

If technically feasible, it would be great to support badge numbers via standard desktop notification APIs (like org.kde.StatusNotifierItem) or app-specific integrations.

Steps to Reproduce:

  1. Pin a supported app (e.g., Telegram or WhatsApp Web via browser) to the task manager.
  2. Receive a new message.
  3. Observe that the icon does not show a badge with the number of new messages.

Expected Behavior: The icon in the task manager should display a badge showing the number of unread or pending items.

2 Likes
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Hi - for what it’s worth, the details and comments on the following KDE Bugtracking System tickets might be helpful background on this topic :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Hello. Thank you for the topic links. I see that this is being treated more as a bug than a feature request. I hope our KDE developers will either develop their own approach or implement the GNOME-style solution and bring notification badges on icons to our beautiful KDE. Thanks again.

1 Like
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I recently started using KDE/Plasma and I came here looking to see if there was a setting I was missing as to why I can’t enable/see notification badges on icons in the panel.

Thank you @johnandmegh for those links so I could read some of the history.

To summarize the discussions: There’s no official KDE/Plasma notification API but Plasma does support the Unity Launcher API that effectively no applications use for “reasons” (can’t be bothered, difficult to implement, have to package libunity etc) and there’s another Gnome based API that most/a lot of applications already use that provides these icon badges however the general consensus of the Plasma dev(s) is that grabbing the notification information destined for the Gnome based API would be bad because that would introduce additional bugs.

So for 9+ years Plasma doesn’t support icon notification badges or flashing/alerting icons because there’s essentially a stalemate..?

I’m trying to tease apart exactly where the gap is… In bug 367086 Kai mentions wanting to:

make a nice KDE Frameworks class to enable applications to easily make use of this API.

I assume that never happened but in your opinion is that the only path forward here or is there another approach?

1 Like
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up!! Thxxx <3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3