[BUG?] tray_output could not display on multiple monitors?

[i3bot]

[Originally reported by chen.bill.bill@…]
(Hi,

I am not sure whether it is a bug or not, maybe it is working like its design.
Here is a bug report or just a feature request, it depends on the origin design.

First, show the features I like. I would like to show the bottom bars on every monitor, with the tray icons in every bar.
That means I would like to set my config file as below:

bar {
    position bottom
    output LVDS
    output VGA-0
    tray_output LVDS
    tray_output VGA-0
    # And more other settings...
}

The bars are correctly displayed both on LVDS and VGA-0. But the tray is ONLY displayed on VGA-0.

If it is a bug, is it possible to fix it?
If it is not a bug, how to make the trays are displayed on both monitors or even more.

Thanks very much!!!

[stapelberg]

Due to the way the tray works in X11, you can only display each tray icon precisely once.

Therefore, we cannot fix this limitation, sorry.

[wizpig64]

@stapelberg This may be a silly question, but would it be possible to have the tray follow the cursor, moving to whichever monitor has focus? And then screenshot the tray to make dummy icons on the non-active monitors?

[Airblader]

Possible, but hacky. I doubt that we would merge such a patch. It also comes with the problem that tray icons can change at any time and a screenshot would not be able to correctly mirror this.

[stapelberg]

We definitely won’t do that. It sounds very unclean to me, and adding support for mouse clicks and the like would be a lot of effort.

[wizpig64]

Alright, just a thought. Thanks.

[mabbamOG]

What about having the tray active on the currently active workspace?
This way wherever you are working, whichever monitor, you can always look down and check the tray.

[Airblader]

I think that kind of effort should just go into #2088 instead.

[mabbamOG]

Will that allow i3 to display the tray on multiple screens at the same time?

[Airblader]

Yes

[mabbamOG]

Sounds good 👍
It might even fix the icon-background-color (in tray area) glitches i've been having when reloading the bar on an other monitor