System tray icons via D-Bus

charlie · October 30, 2025, 2:41am

I was trying to implement a basic system tray icon using some gui kit but ended up making this c lib. Turned out this is a pretty challenging (?) topic. GTK4 dropped support, 3rd party libs are deprecated or require GTK3 (the ones I thought I could get to work).

So this is a pure c dbus system tray handler wrapped in Zig. No Glib, no GTK, no QT. Dynamic icons/titles work, as well as simple menus + callbacks. Pretty minimal, I am trying to expand.

Testing on FreeBSD/Hyprland/eww.

stray1

demo:

 zig build run

github.com/charlesrocket/libstray

example/demo.zig

48277e665

pub fn main() !void {
    var gpa = std.heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator(.{}){};
    defer _ = gpa.deinit();
    const allocator = gpa.allocator();
    var is_active = true;

    // create tray icon
    var icon = try TrayIcon.create(allocator, "stray-demo", "starred", "STRAY demo");
    defer icon.destroy();

    // create menu
    var menu = try TrayMenu.create(allocator);
    defer menu.destroy();

    // add menu items
    _ = try menu.addItem("Open", onOpen, null);
    _ = try menu.addSeparator();
    _ = try menu.addCheckItem("Enable feature", onToggle, null);
    _ = try menu.addSeparator();
    _ = try menu.addItem("Quit", onQuit, &is_active);

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Not sure if this works on macos, there is dbus brew tho. Need to figure out if I can test it on BSD.

charlie · October 30, 2025, 3:05am

There is also GitHub - AyatanaIndicators/libayatana-appindicator-glib: Ayatana Application Indicators Shared Library (GLib-2.0 reimplementation, 100% GTK-free, 100% dbusmenu-free) but its GPL and broken README lies about being implementation of StatusNotifierItem · Issue #89 · AyatanaIndicators/libayatana-appindicator-glib · GitHub.

Southporter · October 30, 2025, 3:08pm

I’ve been looking to do this exact thing for my little break notification app. I was getting nowhere with dbus docs, so this will be a great help. Thanks.

charlie · October 30, 2025, 3:16pm

No worries! I hope it works for you! I am pushing a fix for linux in a few.

Yea the docs are not great, but I guess the level is too low, so there are not many consumers.

charlie · October 30, 2025, 4:35pm

zig 0.15-ready

0.1.0

Bug Fixes

Update callconv()
Update sleep()

Documentation

Add README.md
Update features
Fix TrayIcon comment
Update comments

Features

Add menu support
Add demo app

Miscellaneous tasks

Add LICENSE
Set indentations
Add gitignore
Ignore zig-out

Operations

Add demo test
Install dependencies

Refactor

Move declarations

Styling

Change alignment
Fix formatting
Break open brackets

Build

Add docs step
Fix library links

charlie · November 3, 2025, 3:42pm

0.1.1

Bug Fixes

Drop c_allocator
Resolve leaking items
Fix array list
Update onQuit

Documentation

Update description
Adjust description
Reformat comments

Miscellaneous tasks

Add CI badge

Operations

Add test job

Testing

Add basic app

Build

Bump MSZV to 0.15.2