[Feature] Tray icon support

[ashishpatel1992]

Support for the Tray icon can be added so that the user is not always required to relaunch the application.

[dynobo]

I personally prefer software to not run in the background constantly, especially if I don't need it very often.

But considering the startup time, which is especially slow for the exe-release on windows, I can understand if some people prefer to run it as a service.

Therefore I'll take a look on this, but can't promise anything here, because I have no idea how difficult it is to implement this platform independently (which is one of the major goals for this project).

Thanks for your suggestion!

[ashishpatel1992]

Well, we don't need to run as a service during startup. But a good suggestion is if it's executed once, it can stay at tray icon. The reason is that if a user has selected text recently. There is a high chance that he will again use the tool within a few minutes.

We can consider it a design enhancement. Although as I said it will only go to tray icon when EXE file is executed manually.
(This could be my personal opinion, for now, I have found an alternative way by dragging the executable file to my taskbar and pinned it, so I don't need to go and run the program again and again)

[dynobo]

I like your suggestion! As a first step, we could:

1. add a command line switch like --keep-in-tray to activate the tray icon
2. If the tray icon is active and you click on it, a simple menu will show up:
   
   (the scribble doesn't show a system tray, I know... ;-)

What do you think?

[ashishpatel1992]

Yeah looks good to me. We can use PyQt5 for that. A demonstrated example is available here
This is a cross-platform library for Windows and macOS

[dynobo]

Hey @ashishpatel1992, while PyQt5 definitely could do that, I'll try to stay away from it. It's a too powerful (and bloated) framework, for such a tiny feature. For the same reason I'm currently using Tkinter as UI-Framework, which is less bloated and a default lib in Python.

However, Tkinter (as far as I can tell) doesn't support tray icons. I'm currently experimenting if pystray can do the job :-)

[dynobo]

pystray conflicts with pyperclip (module for clipboard handling). I filed a simple PR which could help: asweigart/pyperclip#182

Waiting till it arrives upstream...

[ashishpatel1992]

Hi @dynobo ,
I have been trying to test pystray but looks like I am stuck at this point. I have followed the documentation Creating a system tray icon.
My Sample code

from pystray import Icon as icon, Menu as menu, MenuItem as item
from PIL import Image

state = False
im = Image.new(mode = "RGB", size = (200, 200), color = (153, 153, 255))

def on_clicked(icon, item):
    global state
    state = not item.checked

icon('test', im, menu=menu(item('Checkable',on_clicked,checked=lambda item: state))).run()

and getting the following error

(base) ashish@pixels:~/Desktop/sa/test$ python test.py 
Failed to dock icon
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/ashish/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pystray/_xorg.py", line 162, in _update_icon
    self._assert_docked()
  File "/home/ashish/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pystray/_xorg.py", line 389, in _assert_docked
    assert self._systray_manager
AssertionError
Failed to dock icon
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/ashish/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pystray/_xorg.py", line 143, in _show
    self._assert_docked()
  File "/home/ashish/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pystray/_xorg.py", line 389, in _assert_docked
    assert self._systray_manager
AssertionError

Do you have any idea about this error? I am testing it on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS

[dynobo]

@ashishpatel1992 : Your code-example works on my machine, I see the "icon" and don't get an error. My best guess is that you are missing a dependency. You could try to install the following stuff:

sudo apt install libgirepository1.0-dev gcc libcairo2-dev pkg-config python3-dev gir1.2-gtk-3.0
pip install PyGObject

[ashishpatel1992]

Hi @dynobo ,
Well, the packages didn't help, but I noticed one thing it wasn't working on Python 3.7.6 but was working fine on python 3.8.
Also tested on windows and working fine under python 3.8

[dynobo]

Tray Icon Support arrived in the latest beta release 0.2.0-b1!

Please help by testing and providing feedback.

[ashishpatel1992]

Hi @dynobo ,
Sure I will test this and let you know the feedback.

[dynobo]

Considered as solved with #116