Tray Icon feature improvements and follow-ups

[leonMSFT]

This issue is mainly for me to keep track of what could/should/would be done to improve on the Tray Icon feature.

Current Tray Icon Behavior

Left-Click = Summon MRU window.
Right-Click = Open Context Menu.

Current Context Menu
 ________________
| Focus Terminal |
| -------------- |    ______________________________
| Windows->      |   |Window {ID} - <unnamed window>|
|________________|   |Named Window 1                |
                     |Named Window 2                |
                     |______________________________|

Clicking on any of the Window items in the Windows submenu will summon that particular window.

What's to come?

"So close I can taste it" : things I'm prioritizing

• Summon only minimized windows
• Quit All
• Quit just the selected window
• Summon All
• Restore All to taskbar
• Create new Window

"Further away so I can't taste it yet" : nice to haves or may be a bit more involved.

• Get rid of the ugly Win32 menu and use WinUI's MenuFlyout
• Customize left-click on icon behavior
• Browse tab names of the selected window
• Custom actions in the context menu
• How to gel with StartOnUserLogin setting?
• Terminal should be able to auto-minimize on focus lost #10660
• Add support for "close to tray" #12933
  • wasn't mentioned anywhere in Spec for Quake Mode #9274 shockingly, coulda swore we discussed this.

"Follow Ups from PRs":

• Make quake window dropdown duration not magic number.
• Settings should refer to Notification Area by correct name (not ‘tray’) Settings should refer to Notification Area by correct name (not ‘tray’) #11101

References

#5727 - Initial Feature Request
#10368 - Initial Tray Icon PR
Tray Icon Spec Section

[mdtauk]

Can I just check, will this be a WinUI MenuFlyout control, an OS Xaml control, or a Win32 Context Menu?

[leonMSFT]

Currently it's a Win32 context menu

[mdtauk]

Currently it's a Win32 context menu

Boo, but I guess it can't be helped?

[leonMSFT]

I'm unclear about how it would be done, but using WinUI's MenuFlyout was something I was thinking about when I first started. In the interest of simplicity for the first pass I stuck with the Win32 version. I'll go ahead and add this to the"others" section though! I'd love to make the context menu look a bit more captivating.😁

[WSLUser]

Quit All
Quit just the selected window
Summon All

Can you also add "Summon just the selected window" to this list?

[leonMSFT]

Can you also add "Summon just the selected window" to this list?

That functionality is already in the initial PR but I forgot to mention it here! You can just click on any particular Window menu item in the Windows submenu to summon it.

There is mention of what users want and what users do. It strikes me that identification of that community might be relevant, and whatever the UX conflict might be with different classes of users who may be exposed to they mysteries of the [system] tray. It may be that all this is to benefit power/IT users and developers who incorporate heavy console session work in their daily efforts. There might be no intersection with what we think of as the ginormous population of ordinary and casual users.

It's definitely difficult to design and implement features in a way that we and all our users (casual, power, and anyone in between) would be delighted by. Community feedback helps guide us, but we still try to account for the tons of users that don't interact with us on Github. Designing for that happy medium and for what we think is right for the Terminal is the goal but it might not hit the mark on first try. I'm still going to be iterating on this feature, so I very much appreciate feedback like yours! 😄

The Discord app is my poster-child for this. I have to go find it in the pop-up to make it quit. I am someone who doesn't want to leave Discord and its notices running all the time. I have found no way to have it not do that.

Discord does have a setting that turns off their "Minimize To Tray" behavior (User Settings -> Windows Settings), but it is on by default.

[HeyItsJono]

Thanks for your hard work on this.

Does #12933 imply that Windows Terminal will persist in the system tray on closure of all open panes? Because this would be ideal, that way we can exit any running sessions and still have a terminal easily summonable via the global summon hotkey to start a new session.

Currently closing all open sessions/panes just closes Windows Terminal and it has to be run again to re-activate the global summon hotkey.

[zadjii-msft]

@HeyItsJono Maybe, but I think the issue you're really looking for is #9996. That's at least the one I'm using for tracking "let the global hotkey work even if there isn't a running terminal window".

[Raton-Laveur]

I'm confused regarding the alwaysShowNotificationIcon and minimizeToNotificationArea both set as false, since it still shows up in the notification area and the taskbar icon. Current 1.15.2712.0 behavior is:

• Windows Startup: no notification icon (of course if startOnUserLogin is false)
• Start Terminal: icon appears on taskbar and notification area
• Notification icon right click states both Quake mode and current window
• Closing current window leaves notification icon since quake mode is still alive

So how do we get completely rid of notification icon?

[DHowett]

Right now there is no way to disable it while a Quake mode window is available.