Unite awake and powertoys tray icon

[eirinn1975]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Instead of having two icons in the tray area, why don't add an Awake dedicated context menu (right click) to the Powertoys icon? Or perhaps giving the possibility to disable the tray icon while keeping awake active in the Powertoys app.

Scenario when this would be used?

Having a less crowded tray area is always good, and in addition it makes sense to have the Awake options under the Powertoys icon, since it's a part of it.

Supporting information

No response

[Jay-o-Way]

Makes sense, but I have a guess that #6751 would be the solution for this. Don't know when it'll be built, though.

[dend]

My first hunch here is that this is a wont-fix - because Awake can be used as a standalone tool. That is - the user can launch Awake without PowerToys and still have the tray available.

[eirinn1975]

Why not giving the opportunity to choose where to have the menu? Then it will be up to the user how he wants to use the feature.

[dend]

Seems like that is just too much variability without much benefit. What is the value-add for the customer here in having the combined tray other than real estate, which I am not sure many folks worry about, since most of it is collapsed anyway?

[eirinn1975]

My 2 cents: real estate is important, and having a less cluttered tray area gives a cleaner user experience , regardless of the fact that it's collapsed or not. Imagine having a tray icon for each single PT function. After a while it gets confusing. In addition to that, if the apps is not completely integrated into powertoys (which is one of the main points in using it instead of a myriad of little apps), I don't see the added value in using Awake instead of, for example, Caffeine.

[dend]

Every app in PowerToys can be used as a standalone component 😀 The PowerToys Settings is merely a configuration abstraction that helps the user not to deal with JSON files. You can launch separate modules separately (they are mostly self-contained).

I'd be curious - how many applications do you have in the system tray? @eirinn1975

It's also not one of the most used real estates (as in - a user is not clicking on the tray every 10 minutes, while trying to sift through all the icons) from what I can tell (anecdotally), so I don't necessarily see this as a benefit yet to have the icons combined.

[eirinn1975]

I see, yet the main window acts basically as "one ring to rule them all" 🙂. I have around 12 icons in addition to the system ones. Different services tend to have a tray icon, and I'm trying to keep them under control (still the number says that I'm not really that good at it 😁) in order to avoid to look too long for the right icon every time I need to change something. Even the power toys icon itself is not very useful today, it's just there to launch the main window, so it would make sense (to me) to use it for something more then just launch the main window. At least having the possibility to disable the awake tray icon would help. I know it's one click more to reach the settings, but for some it might be a welcome addition right for the sake of real estate and ease of recognizability.

[dedavis6797]

Interesting discussion, thank you for the suggestion! I completely understand your perspective @eirinn1975, it would make sense to keep the systray functionalities unified with a single icon under certain circumstances, especially as the app expands to include additional utilities. But @dend is correct in that PowerToys as a whole is meant to be decentralized with the exception of the settings window.

@Jay-o-Way pointed out #6751, which I agree could be the logical solution to this. As we plan out the implementation details, we can play around with the concept of adding settings to allow individual systray icon's to be displayable for the relevant utilities. If there's enough community support we'd be happy to plan a way to incorporate it.

[eirinn1975]

Absolutely, the solution provided in #6751 would definitely solve this.

[Jay-o-Way]

PowerToys as a whole is meant to be decentralized with the exception of the settings window.

@dedavis6797 Just for my clarity, can you explain how that works if/when #7408 is implemented? Because if (for example) Power Rename is opened without PowerToys Settings/runner being active, and you click on the link to open Settings, that still has to start-up first, right?

[dedavis6797]

@Jay-o-Way you're correct I believe. For a functionality like #7408 that engages settings, it would make sense to break from the decentralization and use this unified settings/runner process given a) it's what we do today b) there could always be a case for shared attributes/settings among utilities (universal theme color, for example).

We've made efforts to remove aspects of individual utilities from the runner process before. So as PowerToys continues to evolve, there's always a possibility that we may adopt a new solution that's more self contained.