TopIcons Plus

Introduction

Topicons Plus is an alternative to the Gnome Shell Legacy Tray, which is hidden most of the time and generally considered inconvenient.

It brings all icons to back to the top panel, as with most desktop environments.

With colors:

Grayscale alternative (desaturation setting):

There were an original TopIcons extension for that, but it stopped being maintained and it had a few issues and little configuration options. Thus, this fork.

Before (standard Gnome legacy tray, bottom left):

After:

Enjoy it!

Installation

Pre-Requisite: You need the make utility :

# Debian, Ubuntu
apt-get install make
# RedHad, Fedora
dnf install make

Download the code to any folder, e.g. /home/$USER/Downloads, using these commands :

cd /home/$USER/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/phocean/TopIcons.git

Move to the downloaded folder and execute the installation script:

cd TopIcons
make

The whole process should look similar to this:

% make
glib-compile-schemas schemas
rm -rf _build
mkdir _build
cp -r schemas convenience.js extension.js metadata.json prefs.js README.md _build
echo Build was successfull 
Build was successfull
rm -rf ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/TopIcons@phocean.net
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/TopIcons@phocean.net
cp -r _build/* ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/TopIcons@phocean.net
rm -rf _build
echo Installed in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/TopIcons@phocean.net
Installed in /home/phocean/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/TopIcons@phocean.net
%

To avoid any Gnome update issue (see the official statement), make sure that version check is disabled:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-extension-version-validation "true"

This moved the extension to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions with the proper naming convention.

Now, reload GNOME Shell with Alt+F2 and then r or login/logout.

Finally, launch the gnome-tweak-tool utility to manage extensions. There, you can enable TopIcons Plus and then tweak its appearance settings:

Compatibility

GNOME Shell 3.16 and up.

Changelog

v16:

Updated Gnome version support
Documentation updates
Minor changes to the icon box layout (margin)

Known issues

Dropbox

The Dropbox notification icon sometimes trashes the tray (also buggy with the Gnome legacy tray).

You can restore the tray by reloading Gnome-shell (ALT-F2, r).

On a longer term, you can solve this problem using:

systemd to launch Dropbox (instead of as a Gnome startup application),
rely on the Dropbox nautilus extension to get a visual feedback on the synchronization status.

Here is the systemd script to run it in the user context (thanks @robolange for the tip):

$ cat ~/.config/systemd/user/dropbox.service
[Unit]
Description=Dropbox Service

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dropbox start
ExecStop=/usr/bin/dropbox stop
PIDFile=${HOME}/.dropbox/dropbox.pid
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5
StartLimitInterval=60s
StartLimitBurst=3

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Which you can enable with these commands:

systemctl --user enable dropbox
systemctl --user start dropbox

Credits

Many thanks go to Adel Gadllah for making the original extension and also to Mjnaderi for the Toptray fork.

Also, thanks to all contributors (code and issues), and especially to nevesnunes for the very nice code improvements he brought up!

Notes

The extension is pending review on https://extensions.gnome.org, so hopefully it will be validated so that it is easier to install soon.

audreytoskin / TopIcons-plus