Tray / status bar

A tray icon is a persistent icon in the operating system’s status area: the menu bar on macOS, the system tray on Windows, and the AppIndicator area on Linux. Each icon has an image, a tooltip, a right-click menu, and click handlers. TrayIcon is a builder; you must keep the returned value alive for the icon to remain visible.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
use laufey::{MenuItem, TrayIcon};

let tray = TrayIcon::new()
  .icon(include_bytes!("icon.png"))
  .icon_dark(include_bytes!("icon-dark.png")) // optional dark-mode variant
  .tooltip("My App")
  .menu(&[MenuItem::Role { role: "quit".into() }], |id| println!("{id}"))
  .on_click(|| println!("clicked"))
  .on_double_click(|| println!("double clicked"));

// The icon's bounds let you anchor a popover panel beneath it.
let bounds = tray.get_bounds(); // Option<(x, y, width, height)>
}

When you provide both a light and a dark icon, the backend watches the system appearance and swaps between them live: it observes AppleInterfaceThemeChangedNotification on macOS, the WM_SETTINGCHANGE message together with the AppsUseLightTheme setting on Windows, and polls once per event-loop tick on Winit. On Linux, AppIndicator renders the icon through the desktop theme and does not deliver click or double-click events, and the StatusNotifierItem specification has no tooltip, so click handlers, tooltips, and dark-mode swapping have no effect there. The CEF backend also uses AppIndicator on Linux, so a tray icon does not require a browser window.

On Linux, the CEF and WebView backends load the appindicator library at runtime — libayatana-appindicator3.so.1 first, falling back to the legacy libappindicator3.so.1. If neither is installed, tray creation returns id 0 and all tray calls are no-ops; the rest of the application is unaffected. If you package an application that uses a tray icon as a .deb/.rpm, declare a dependency on the distro’s Ayatana runtime package (Debian/Ubuntu: libayatana-appindicator3-1; Fedora: libayatana-appindicator-gtk3). The desktop must also run a StatusNotifier host for the icon to show (GNOME needs the AppIndicator extension; KDE, Cinnamon, and most others ship one).