pidgin-indicator: AppIndicator/KStatusNotifierItem Plugin for Pidgin
This plugins provides an AppIndicator/KStatusNotifierItem for pidgin. All the current desktop environments are moving away from XEmbed based systray icons, and that is the only kind of icon that Pidigin provides out of the box.
Ubuntu Unity (now deprecated) and KDE Plasma provide native support for AppIndicators/KStatusNotifierItems, and a gnome-shell extension provides support in GNOME (and this extension is installed by default in Ubuntu starting in 17.10).
I originally developed this plugin when Ubuntu Unity dropped support for legacy systray icons and I found the official alternative - their Messaging indicator - to be inadequate. It consolidated status from multiple applications, and I found it to be much less usable than the original Pidgin tray icon. Ultimately, with the move from Unity to GNOME in Ubuntu, this Messaging indicator has been deprecated so there's even more reason for this plugin to exist.
Functionality
The indicator provides all the same functionality as the original tray icon, but not in exactly the same way.
- The 'smart' click behaviour that either shows the buddy list or unread
messages is mapped to the appindicator 'secondary action'.
- This is because indicators do not get to control what happens on clicks. The 'secondary action' is intended to be something done instead of showing the menu. It is up to the indicator provider in the destkop environment to decide what action triggers the secondary action, if at all.
- In Unity, a middle-click triggers the secondary action
- In gnome-shell using the AppIndicator/KStatusNotifierItem extension, very recent versions now support the same middle-click behaviour as in Unity. This extension is installed by default with Ubuntu 17.10.
- I'm not sure what KDE Plasma does. Some people have said it also does secondary activation on a middle click, and some say a left click. I think this may have changed over successive releases.
- As the indicator is a separate process from pidgin itself, there are sometimes conflicts with Focus Stealing Prevention when you use the indicator to go to unread messages. You may need to disable FSP for Pidgin to get around this.
- Due to how indicators work, the secondary action must also be a menu item, so it's the new Show/Hide item at the top of the menu.
- Due to indicator limitations, some of the special icons can't be shown next to menu items any more.
Required packages
Runtime:
- pidgin 2.10.x
- libappindicator-0.1
Buildtime:
- build-essential
- pidgin-dev
- libappindicator-dev
- autoconf
- automake
- libtool
- intltool
The configure script can be generated by running:
- autoreconf -i
Binary Package Repositories
There are official packages for Fedora and OpenSUSE, so you can just install it from the default repositories. Ironically, there is no official Ubuntu packaging.
I've created an Ubuntu PPA for deb packaging, starting from bionic.
It was previously packaged within the webupd8 PPA but this seems to be
defunct, but remains useful for older distro releases.