gobject:object, common-lisp:standard-object, common-lisp:t

None

The "system tray" or notification area is normally used for transient icons that indicate some special state. For example, a system tray icon might appear to tell the user that they have new mail, or have an incoming instant message, or something along those lines. The basic idea is that creating an icon in the notification area is less annoying than popping up a dialog.

A gtk:status-icon object can be used to display an icon in a "system tray". The icon can have a tooltip, and the user can interact with it by activating it or popping up a context menu.

It is very important to notice that status icons depend on the existence of a notification area being available to the user. You should not use status icons as the only way to convey critical information regarding your application, as the notification area may not exist on the environment of the user, or may have been removed. You should always check that a status icon has been embedded into a notification area by using the function gtk:status-icon-is-embedded, and gracefully recover if the function returns nil.

On X11, the implementation follows the freedesktop.org "System Tray" specification. Implementations of the "tray" side of this specification can be found, for example, in the GNOME 2 and KDE panel applications.

Note that a status icon is not a widget, but just a g:object object. Making it a widget would be impractical, since the system tray on Win32 does not allow to embed arbitrary widgets. The gtk:status-icon class has been deprecated in 3.14. You should consider using notifications or more modern platform-specific APIs instead. GLib provides the GNotification API which works well with the gtk:application class on multiple platforms and environments, and should be the preferred mechanism to notify the users of transient status updates. See GNotification for code examples.