G’day. I’m using bspwm with polybar - installed on the Manjaro XFCE edition. I’m loving the tiling WM. Something is puzzling me. IIUC polybar does not have a systray, however I’m seeing one showing nm-applet, power applet, pamac updates, bluetooth applet, redshift etc. It didn’t start showing up until I configured lxsession to start at bspwm login.
What I’m trying to do is set which monitor it shows up on. I have a laptop, but primary monitor is external displayport monitor. I’d like it to show up on that one, but it’s inconsistent - sometimes it does, but more often than not it shows up on the laptop screen. I’m not setting it anywhere, it just appears.
use something more common like i3, i very much doubt you’ll find many bspwm users.
in xfce you can even disable xfwm4 & xfdesktop, put i3 in autostart to get tiling in xfce.
or
logout & select i3 from the session menu to get a pure experience.
I use bspwm with polybar too (without a systray though)
There is a systray section in the configuration page on the polybar wiki, did you check it already ?
Also you might find that video useful (helped me a lot for my dual monitor settings) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAimFhf84QI
@kerry_s - I didn’t know that you could do that with XFCE - might try it, but I’m enjoying the bspwm experience. I have tried i3, but bspwm is better for me.
@mithrial - I’ve got xrandr already set up like that. Polybar and the dual monitors are working fine. It’s the systray that’s not showing up on the primary monitor.
@oguere - thanks - I’ve seen the systray section on polybar wiki. I’ll be ok setting up a new polybar that I configure. My confusion is that one has appeared and I didn’t ask it to, and I’m wondering where it came from. I’m assuming it’s from the XFCE settings somehow when I start lxsession? I’ll check that youtube video link out. Thanks.
[edit] - Checked out the youtube video, and turns out I’d already seen it.
@kainonergon - G’day mate. Thanks for replying. I don’t have stalonetray even installed. Here are some pstree screenshots. I can’t figure this one out - feels like I’m missing something obvious.
Maybe that’s just polybar bug and not its feature. You can browse open issues about tray or multi monitor setup on polybar github page. I don’t use tray so I can’t help much here.
EDIT. You can try to start polybar from the command line and see if there are some relevant messages. Also you can get a lot of additional information on what polybar is doing with its tray using this command (substitute barname with actual bar name from your polybar config file):
polybar -l trace barname 2>&1 | grep -i tray
It prints a lot of messages, but I don’t know if they show something useful for your issue.
Thanks mate. I’m not falling on my sword over this. It’s a minor niggle, but I can live with it the way it is. I’ll have a bit more of a tinker when I get a bit more time and report back here if/when solved.
I’m a goose. Just noticed while playing around with my polybar config that the tray-position, padding, and background were all set in the section/base part of the config, rather than the bar/primary monitor section. Moved them to the primary monitor section, restarted polybar, and looks like it’s working.
