GSettings option to hide the status/indicator icon

[tari01]

blueman: 2.1.4 BlueZ: 5.55 Distribution: Manjaro Desktop environment: MATE

I have consulted the Troubleshooting page and done my best effort to follow.

Currently we have no mechanism that would hide the blueman-applet icon (in either SNI or legacy mode), while keeping the daemon running. It would be really useful if the applet could expose a GSettings option that would allow the user to hide/show the applet.

[cschramm]

As you found in the other thread, the blueman-applet process is vital. What is not and actually displays the icon is the blueman-tray process. It gets auto-started by the StatusIcon plugin.

We thought about making the StatusIcon plugin optional in #949. That is some effort, though, as some other parts rely on its presence.

What's the motivation behind this?

[tari01]

Thank you for your reply.

As you found in the other thread, the blueman-applet process is vital.

Yes. I see no reason why anyone would want to disable blueman-applet. It is a very stable all-in-one backend.

We thought about making the StatusIcon plugin optional in #949

:+1:

What's the motivation behind this?

Applications that provide an alternate indication mechanism would need the daemon running, but would also like to have a means of disabling the icon to avoid confusion/double indicators.

[cschramm]

Looks easier than I thought. #1496.

Applications that provide an alternate indication mechanism

To be honest, I'm not sure if I like that as the icon provides functionality and is at least needed to manage applet plugins. We'd have to look into providing that in blueman-manager or something to avoid losing it.

[ton]

What is the status of this, is this supposed to work now?

I would like to run blueman-applet in the background only (without a systray icon), and use blueman-manager for interacting with the tool.

I've tried several options to disable the systray icon, without success:

• Disabling the AppIndicator plugin. It removes the systray icon temporarily but it immediately shows up again. After restarting blueman-applet, the AppIndicator plugin is listed as disabled, but the systray icon is still there.
• Removing !AppIndicator or AppIndicator from the dconf key.

I'm using the latest version of blueman (2.2.2 at the time of this writing).

My solution that does work for now is to start blueman-applet from a script that first starts the applet, then kills the blueman-tray process:

#!/bin/sh
blueman-applet &
while ! pgrep -x blueman-tray; do
    sleep 0.01
done
killall -e blueman-tray

[cschramm]

@ton: You can test #1496. It should allow to disable the StatusIcon plugin.