Usage

Using AllTray

AllTray is an application that enables you to run long-lived applications and tuck them away into the system tray when you want them to disappear. It is useful for running Internet mail clients such as Evolution, or other programs that you like to have running for a long time, but being “minimized” to the tray isn’t one of the features of the application.

Please note that this page, and really this whole Wiki, only document new AllTray; that is, versions 0.7.1dev and later, which are on-track to become the next stable release.

Implemented Features

• Hotkey support: You can “bind” a hotkey for an application when AllTray starts up. To do this, use the “-K” or “--hotkey” option. See the man page for additional information.
• Close-to-tray support: When -C (or --enable-ctt) is passed to AllTray, it will enable support for close-to-tray. AllTray will draw a little AllTray icon in the windows of the application that it is managing. When you click on the little AllTray icon, the window will be minimized to the tray.
• Attach mode: Normally, when you run AllTray, you tell AllTray to start a program and it will attach to that program. This is different in attach mode; in attach mode, AllTray will display a little window and tell you to click on the window for the application that you want to dock into the tray. This way, you can dock things that were started before AllTray.
• Attach to PID: A variant on attach mode, you can tell AllTray to attach directly to a process ID that is using the window system; this means that you don't have to select any of the windows for the process.
• A convenient menu: AllTray displays a convenient menu when you right-click on its tray icon. Using that menu, you can control the visibility of individual windows in your application, the whole application, undock (e.g., exit AllTray but leave the application running), or display information about AllTray.
• The ability to obtain its command-line options from an environment variable, ALLTRAY_OPTIONS, so that one can specify default options by putting them in the environment; see the man page for more information.
• A relatively flexible debugging system, there in case you do run into a problem; see the man page for more information.

Proposed Features

If you have an idea for a feature for AllTray, please file an issue on GitHub (be sure to give it the “Feature Request” label!). If possible, and if it doesn't add too much “bloat” to the AllTray software, it will very likely be implemented. Of course, if you feel like implementing it, you are more than welcome to do so. You can easily fork the AllTray code, implement the desired feature, and issue a “pull request”, all using GitHub.

Command-line options

This is just an overview. Please see the man page for details!

• -a/--attach: Attach to an already-running application.
• -C/--enable-ctt: Enable Close-To-Tray support.
• -H/--hide: Start by hiding the application.
• -K/--hotkey: Enable hotkey support. Specify the hotkey as a parameter to this option.
• -p/--process: Attach to a specific process; implies -a/--attach.
• -v/--version: Display the program version, copyright, and license.
• -V/--extended-version: Display -v, plus build information.