Caprine: Tray icon needs rework or option to turn off

[Jimi-James]

I have a few problems with the tray icon:
-The show/hide right-click menu is extremely cumbersome compared to what most other programs do: click to hide; click again to show.
-There is no start-minimized option (and I mean minimized to tray, not as a minimized window).
-The icon doesn't change when there are unread messages, making it almost pointless as I still have to manually show the messages window to check after I've been away from the computer.

Because of these problems, I actually currently get a much better tray icon out of using alltray with the -H option. However, since I can't turn caprine's icon off, that leaves me with 2 icons. Because of that, I'm stuck on the seemingly abandoned other unofficial Messenger (https://github.com/Aluxian/Facebook-Messenger-Desktop) because it does not have a tray icon, making alltray viable.

[sindresorhus]

The show/hide right-click menu is extremely cumbersome compared to what most other programs do: click to hide; click again to show.

That's exactly what you can do in the latest version. https://github.com/sindresorhus/caprine/commit/4c793d6d2c713471daba9e6494a8801e1a6970d4

There is no start-minimized option

That's because you can do that in the OS. No need for an option in every single app.

The icon doesn't change when there are unread messages, making it almost pointless as I still have to manually show the messages window to check after I've been away from the computer.

There are still notifications, though. I don't think it's possible to dynamically change the tray icon, but you could always open an issue on https://github.com/atom/electron. I would be happy to add it if possible.

[Jimi-James]

Oh. I should've checked the newest version, then.

That's because you can do that in the OS. No need for an option in every single app.

I can do that in the OS? How? I've never heard of that feature. I hope you're not talking about Windows, because I'm on Linux. Even if I was on Windows, doesn't that just minimize the window to the taskbar? That's a pretty ghetto setup when I want the window completely gone and minimized to the tray icon.

[sindresorhus]

I was talking about Windows. No idea how things work on Linux.

[Jimi-James]

So, can you please work on adding that feature? Even if I was on Windows, I would not have been OK with just minimizing the window to the taskbar. That's exactly why individual programs still need that option. If none of them had it, the taskbar would be a huge mess of minimized crap every startup, which means you still need user intervention at boot to clean things up, which entirely defeats the point of the feature: eliminating the need for user intervention at boot.

[Jimi-James]

Sorry for taking a while to reply on this one, but:

There are still notifications, though. I don't think it's possible to dynamically change the tray icon, but you could always open an issue on https://github.com/atom/electron. I would be happy to add it if possible.

It looks to me like it is possible to dynamically change the icon, though for a time it seemed like it wasn't: https://github.com/atom/electron/issues/1473
So, I can open a new issue for it if you want (please say so if that's the case), but I definitely need the tray icon to change when there's an unread message so that I can leave my computer and miss notifications without missing the messages.

[sindresorhus]

So, can you please work on adding that feature?

No, but see: https://github.com/sindresorhus/caprine/issues/64.

It looks to me like it is possible to dynamically change the icon

It's possible to change it dynamically, true, but it accepts a path, not a buffer. So you would have to write an image to disk whenever the count changes, which is suboptimal. I suggest you open an issue on Electron for adding support for tray to accept an image buffer in addition to a path. That would make what you're asking a lot simpler. Feel free to open a new issue here for it after opening the Electron issue and make sure to cross-link them.

[Jimi-James]

Suboptimal is better than nothing. I have plenty of scripts that write something to disk. Why don't you plan to implement that for now, and open an issue about changing the buffer yourself? I don't know enough about these two projects to explain that properly, and you do. How do you not agree that only having notifications but not having a way to notice them after those brief few seconds is much more supoptimal?