Tray icon UX

[andrei-a-papou]

I'd like to report my experience with using the tray icon so that this feature could be enhanced in the future to provide a better, more seamless UX.

All of this is under Linux, but some of the points will probably apply to other platforms as well.

Compared to other Linux apps, the current sleek tray icon experience feels a bit clunky and does not provide a smooth UX -- especially compared to the rest of the app which is generally, in my opinion, well thought-out.

Here's what I believe could be improved:

1. Single-instance mode: when a sleek instance is already running and a user launches another one, sleek shouldn't create another window and put another icon in the tray. Instead, the currently running window should be focused. This way a user can assign a hotkey to show/hide sleek very easily, using built-in window manager/desktop preferences.
2. When opening sleek from the tray icon, the icon is first removed and then re-added, which looks clunky/jerky. No other app does this (including Electron-based ones such as Joplin), so I hope it's possible avoid this behavior. I understand it could be an Electron quirk, but perhaps this issue could be helped.
3. Left-clicking the tray icon should toggle sleek visibility, as described in Better left-click tray icon behavior #618
4. The tray icon looks odd on many modern Linux desktops, like GNOME or Xfce that prefer monochromatic icons in the tray. This problem is not unique to sleek as some other (usually closed-source apps hardcode their tray icons), but the problem bugs a lot of users, there's even a special project that patches hardcoded icons for a good UX.

It would be great if sleek could pick up an icon from the currently active XDG/freedesktop.org theme, or if an SVG icon could be specified via a CLI parameter. With v2.0.8 under Xfce the icon looks just bad, with a white circle around it (I think it's a regression from other 2.x versions as the white circle wasn't there before): https://i.imgur.com/Imjb10v.png

I realize some of these could be Electron-related, but I hope they can be addressed over time. I would be happy to test any builds that improve tray icon behavior when/if they become available.

[RobLW]

Interesting because I use Gnome and left click to open the app works great for me.
I also only get a single instance if launching from Gnome app menu, but I control this within Gnome itself which applies to all my apps.

It would be nice to have an option for the tray icon, but the current one looks smashing next to Teams and Cider 2 which all have similar colours. I don't think any of my 3rd party apps use monochrome icons in the tray.

[andrei-a-papou]

Interesting because I use Gnome and left click to open the app works great for me.

It does for me too. But that's not the issue. Left click should toggle visibility, not just open the app. I'm not aware of any tray app under Linux that just opens itself on left click, but does not hide itself on a subsequent click. GoldenDict, Telegram, Syncthing (both Qt and GTK GUIs), Pidgin, KeePassXC, the list goes on.