Feature request: Access system tray icons

[joshuawood]

Hi,

Since FARR has done away with my start menu, I figured it would be nice to do away with the system tray also, be it natively in FARR or via plugin.

Here's how I'm thinking it would work:

Some alias, say "tray", would enumerate the tray icons and list them in the FARR results window. 2 user-definable hotkeys, one for left mouse click one for right, would trigger the assocaited tray menus, if available (ie, not all tray icons have left/right click options, some have both). Alternatively, you could simply left or right mouse click on the item, but that's somewhat defeating the use of FARR

So, you'd get your list and then press for eg, ctrl-fx for left click where fx is the function key corresponding to the desired tray icon in the results window. Or alt-fx for right click. It would then display the appropriate menu as it corresponds to that mouse click for that icon.

You could further refine the search results by for eg "tray <search term>" for those with more than 10 tray icons, where search term works like FARR's current search ability, including non-contiguous results.

This way you could hide most (all, if possible) tray icons but still easily and quickly access them, saving valuable taskbar real estate, esp for those of us on laptops with only 1280x800 screens.

Oh, and happy new year to all.

Regards,
Josh

[d4ni]

Nice idea. Not sure if it is possible to implement but if it is it would definitely be very nice

[phitsc]

Yep, I thought that as well. If it is possible, it's certainly possible to do it in a plugin.

[joshuawood]

I don't see why it's not. I've seen programs that can "merge" all the tray icons in to 1, and clicking on that 1 produces a drop list to select each icon, which you can right/left click on as normal. So there must be some way to enumerate the icons, prob with the win32 api. Alternatively, UI automation might be able to be used, as was suggested in my quick googling on system tray coding: http://msdn.microsof...#UI_Elements_compare

But from the above software, called systrayx http://www.xdesksoft...re.com/systrayx.html it is most certainly possible.

Edit: Bit more searching turned up this code:
http://www.codeproje...s/ShellTrayInfo.aspx

Looks very similar to what I was suggesting. It seems a bit buggy, eg the right click menus remain, but it's essentially everything that should be needed to do the job. I would suggest reading the comments also.