Componentpedia / Listings / tray-icon

tray-icon lets you create tray icons for desktop applications.

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux (gtk Only)
• FreeBSD (gtk Only)

• On Windows and Linux or FreeBSD, an event loop must be running on the thread, on Windows, a win32 event loop and on Linux or FreeBSD, a gtk event loop. It doesn't need to be the main thread but you have to create the tray icon on the same thread as the event loop.
• On macOS, an event loop must be running on the main thread so you also need to create the tray icon on the main thread.

• common-controls-v6: Use TaskDialogIndirect API from ComCtl32.dll v6 on Windows for showing the predefined About menu item dialog.
• libxdo: Enables linking to libxdo which is used for the predfined Copy, Cut, Paste and SelectAll menu item, see https://github.com/tauri-apps/muda#cargo-features
• serde: Enables de/serializing derives.

On Linux, gtk, libxdo is used to make the predfined Copy, Cut, Paste and SelectAll menu items work and libappindicator or libayatnat-appindicator are used to create the tray icon, so make sure to install them on your system.

pacman -S gtk3 xdotool libappindicator-gtk3 #or libayatana-appindicator

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libxdo-dev libappindicator3-dev #or libayatana-appindicator3-dev

Install this dependencies in order to compile tray-icon. Instructions using pkg:

pkg install -y rust glib pkgconf gtk3

use tray_icon::TrayIconBuilder;

let tray_icon = TrayIconBuilder::new()
    .with_tooltip("system-tray - tray icon library!")
    .with_icon(icon)
    .build()
    .unwrap();

use tray_icon::{TrayIconBuilder, menu::Menu};

let tray_menu = Menu::new();
let tray_icon = TrayIconBuilder::new()
    .with_menu(Box::new(tray_menu))
    .with_tooltip("system-tray - tray icon library!")
    .with_icon(icon)
    .build()
    .unwrap();

You can use TrayIconEvent::receiver to get a reference to the TrayIconEventReceiver which you can use to listen to events when a click happens on the tray icon

use tray_icon::TrayIconEvent;

if let Ok(event) = TrayIconEvent::receiver().try_recv() {
    println!("{:?}", event);
}

You can also listen for the menu events using MenuEvent::receiver to get events for the tray context menu.

use tray_icon::{TrayIconEvent, menu::{MenuEvent}};

if let Ok(event) = TrayIconEvent::receiver().try_recv() {
    println!("tray event: {:?}", event);
}

if let Ok(event) = MenuEvent::receiver().try_recv() {
    println!("menu event: {:?}", event);
}

You should use [TrayIconEvent::set_event_handler] and forward the tray icon events to the event loop by using EventLoopProxy so that the event loop is awakened on each tray icon event. Same can be done for menu events using [MenuEvent::set_event_handler].

enum UserEvent {
  TrayIconEvent(tray_icon::TrayIconEvent)
  MenuEvent(tray_icon::menu::MenuEvent)
}

let event_loop = EventLoop::<UserEvent>::with_user_event().build().unwrap();

let proxy = event_loop.create_proxy();
tray_icon::TrayIconEvent::set_event_handler(Some(move |event| {
    proxy.send_event(UserEvent::TrayIconEvent(event));
}));

let proxy = event_loop.create_proxy();
tray_icon::menu::MenuEvent::set_event_handler(Some(move |event| {
    proxy.send_event(UserEvent::MenuEvent(event));
}));

Apache-2.0/MIT