How to find the indicator ID

[display-inline-flex]

I am using the "AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support" extension. I added an indicator by going to the system tray icons and entering chrome_status_icon_1 in the indicator ID field. The icon path is /home/mik/Configurations/Assers/icons/tray/discord/discord-icon-white.svg, and Test is Discord

However, I cannot find the indicator ID for Telegram. Can anyone help me with this or provide guidance on how to locate the ID for Telegram?

[Artim96]

It's pretty much impossible to find out. You just have to hope that one day #312 is getting merged. Technically it should be doable from the looking glass (#355 ) but at least on Wayland this doesn't seem to work at all.

[aunetx]

One way to do that is (ironically) to install waybar, add the tray indicator in it and start waybar in verbose mode. It gives the indicator id, and at least does not require you to search them on looking glass (it is so extremely difficult I don't understand why)

[Artim96]

It says it's for "Sway and Wlroots" based compositors. You sure it will even work with mutter?

[aunetx]

I think it worked last time I tested it! Of course not perfectly but the point would be to just have it to print enough information (it is way easier than fiddling with gnome)

[Artim96]

It doesn't look like it still does:

** (waybar:15860): WARNING **: 11:46:26.495: It appears your Wayland compositor does not support the Layer Shell protocol
[2025-04-07 11:46:26.495] [error] The Wayland compositor does not support wlr-layer-shell protocol

Or did you compile it from source?

[aunetx]

My bad, I think I used it under hyprland... Though that is an option (installing hyprland+waybar and looking at the indicator IDs), but maybe a bit too much. I don't have any idea how to do it otherwise though :/

[thmo]

I had the same issue for Zim, and here's how I found out the ID. The basic idea was to introspect dbus, here with qdbus, and gdbus, maybe its easier to use graphical tool like D-Spy or D-Feet.

# find out the servicename
$ qdbus | grep -i zim
 org.zim_wiki.Zim

$ gdbus introspect --session --dest org.zim_wiki.Zim --object-path / --recurse --only-properties
node / {
  node /org {
    node /org/ayatana {
      node /org/ayatana/NotificationItem {
        node /org/ayatana/NotificationItem/zim_desktop_wiki {
          interface org.kde.StatusNotifierItem {
            properties:
              readonly s Id = 'zim-desktop-wiki';
              readonly s Category = 'ApplicationStatus';
              readonly s Status = 'Active';
              readonly s IconName = 'zim';
[...]

Bingo - the ID is zim-desktop-wiki.

This might not work for all apps though, but only for those implementing org.kde.StatusNotifierItem.

[Artim96]

This might not work for all apps though, but only for those implementing org.kde.StatusNotifierItem.

It seems this must be the case. Interestingly enough, I only have Qt- and Electron-based apps that I want to show up with their app indicator, but trying it with two of the Qt-based ones didn't work at all. One was KeePassXC, neither gdbus nur D-Feet was able to tell me anything in that direction, and the second program didn't even really have a servicename, it was just called :1.120, also with no information whatsoever about the ID. So while I was able to verify D-Spy seems to be quite lacking, D-Feet may indeed work in the cases where org.kde.StatusNotifierItem is being used.

[thmo]

Reworked the recipe a bit:

#!/usr/bin/bash

while IFS=@ read -r dest path ; do
    title=$(qdbus "$dest" "$path" org.kde.StatusNotifierItem.Title)
    id=$(qdbus "$dest" "$path" org.kde.StatusNotifierItem.Id)
    printf "Title: %s, ID: %s\n" "$title" "$id"
done < <(qdbus org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher \
	 /StatusNotifierWatcher \
	 org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher.RegisteredStatusNotifierItems)

Here, this returns:

Title: Solaar, ID: indicator-solaar
Title: KeePassXC, ID: KeePassXC
Title: zim, ID: zim-desktop-wiki

❗ Only works if the application has an introspectable object. Maybe I'll work out a variant of that script that gets the properties directly, without introspection. See next comment.

[thmo]

Here we go (in Python this time):

import dbus

bus = dbus.SessionBus()

for r in bus.get_object("org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher", "/StatusNotifierWatcher").Get(
    "org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher",
    "RegisteredStatusNotifierItems",
    dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
):
    dest, path = r.split("@")
    props = bus.get_object(dest, path).GetAll(
        "org.kde.StatusNotifierItem",
        dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
    )
    print(f"Title: {props['Title'] or '(no title)'}, ID: {props['Id']}")

(will stop spamming this ticket now, sorry)

[Artim96]

Still it can't detect KeePassXC. The bash script may fail as Debian Testing only has qdbus6 (and qdbus as part of qtchooser, but that's probably something else, as that doesn't have any usable output at all). The python script is able to find "chrome_status_icon_1" which probably belongs to Discord (and probably any Electron App, making this method even more limited), and it finds one other App, but the two other apps that are showing their app indicator are not mentioned at all.

Also, your python script assumes every name will contain an @ that allows for splitting names into two parts. That doesn't seem to be necessarily true. A better version of the script would be this:

import dbus

bus = dbus.SessionBus()

for r in bus.get_object("org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher", "/StatusNotifierWatcher").Get(
    "org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher",
    "RegisteredStatusNotifierItems",
    dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
):
    parts = r.split("@")
    if len(parts) == 2:
        dest, path = parts
        props = bus.get_object(dest, path).GetAll(
            "org.kde.StatusNotifierItem",
            dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
        )
        print(f"Title: {props['Title'] or '(no title)'}, ID: {props['Id']}")
    else:
        print(f"Unexpected format for RegisteredStatusNotifierItem: {r}")

[thmo]

If the Id can be the same for multiple tray entries (chrome_status_icon_1) that would be a limitation of the configuration possibilities of this shell extension, not of the script ;)

For the other remark, did you see items without @ - can you give an example how they look like?

Finally, which app doesn't show up at all? If you name it, I could try locally.

[Artim96]

For the other remark, did you see items without @ - can you give an example how they look like?

Unknown. The script merely complains about

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/user/test.py", line 10, in <module>
    dest, path = r.split("@")
    ^^^^^^^^^^
ValueError: not enough values to unpack (expected 2, got 1)

Possibly this is what it complains about (which is an error from my version that's written above the two detected appindicators: Unexpected format for RegisteredStatusNotifierItem: org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-3757-1. It seems this is KeePassXC:

gdbus introspect --session --dest org.kde.StatusNotifierItem-3757-1 --object-path / --recurse --only-properties
node / {
  node /MenuBar {
    interface com.canonical.dbusmenu {
      properties:
        readonly u Version = 4;
        readonly s TextDirection = 'ltr';
        readonly s Status = 'normal';
        readonly as IconThemePath;
    };
  };
  node /StatusNotifierItem {
    interface org.kde.StatusNotifierItem {
      properties:
        readonly s Category = 'ApplicationStatus';
        readonly s Id = 'KeePassXC';
        readonly s Title = 'KeePassXC';
        readonly s Status = 'Active';
        readonly i WindowId;
        readonly s IconThemePath;
        readonly o Menu = '/MenuBar';
        readonly b ItemIsMenu = false;
        readonly s IconName = 'keepassxc-locked';
        @org.qtproject.QtDBus.QtTypeName("QXdgDBusImageVector")
        readonly a(iiay) IconPixmap = [(48, 48, [Cutting lots of hex values])];
        readonly s OverlayIconName = '';
        @org.qtproject.QtDBus.QtTypeName("QXdgDBusImageVector")
        readonly a(iiay) OverlayIconPixmap = [];
        readonly s AttentionIconName = '';
        @org.qtproject.QtDBus.QtTypeName("QXdgDBusImageVector")
        readonly a(iiay) AttentionIconPixmap = [];
        readonly s AttentionMovieName = '';
        @org.qtproject.QtDBus.QtTypeName("QXdgDBusToolTipStruct")
        readonly (sa(iiay)ss) ToolTip = ('', [], 'database.kdbx [Locked] - KeePassXC', '');
    };
  };
};

[thmo]

Ok, so maybe for the path, if not sepcified, a default should be used:

import dbus

bus = dbus.SessionBus()

for r in bus.get_object("org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher", "/StatusNotifierWatcher").Get(
    "org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher",
    "RegisteredStatusNotifierItems",
    dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
):
    dest, _, path = r.partition("@")
    props = bus.get_object(dest, path or "/StatusNotifierItem").GetAll(
        "org.kde.StatusNotifierItem",
        dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
    )
    print(f"Title: {props['Title'] or '(no title)'}, ID: {props['Id']}")