Many X apps these days require a system tray. GNOME and KDE have system tray applets enabled in their panels by default. WindowMaker doesn’t have a panel. It supports DockApps, which are, of course, much cooler. 😛
wmsystray
wmsystray (homepage) is a DockApp that supplies a notification area for Window Maker. The version that is in Portage (0.1.1) was maintained by Matthew Reppert. Was; I installed it almost a year ago and it crashed as soon as I started the first app which used the system tray. I went looking for a newer version than the one in Portage. I found it in a comment on its dockapps.org page by Vlad Dinulescu. He had fixed a few bugs and released a new version (0.2.0).
Unfortunately, version 0.2.0 suffers some problems of its own: it crashes when I quit Skype and it sometimes “loses” the uTorrent icon (usually when I have to restart the DockApp after quiting Skype).
Why isn’t this built into Window Maker?
I would much prefer it if Window Maker natively supported a notification area, preferably with the icons appearing within or replacing the App Icons. I’m not the first to have this wish. There exists a patch already, but the WM devs don’t like the idea.
An alternative to wmsystray
Something that I completely overlooked until I started writing this post is this, which looks like a decent alternative to wmsystray. I’ll have to try if that one works better than wmsystray. Some time…
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