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Cross-platform, super tiny C99 implementation of a system tray icon with a popup menu and notifications.

Overview

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About

Cross-platform, super tiny C99 implementation of a system tray icon with a popup menu and notifications.

The code is C++ friendly and will compile fine in C++98 and up. This is a fork of
dmikushin/tray and is intended to add additional features required for our own
Sunshine project.

This fork adds the following features:

  • system tray notifications
  • support for both linux appindicator versions
  • unit tests
  • code coverage
  • refactored code, e.g. moved source code into the src directory
  • doxygen documentation, and readthedocs configuration

Screenshots

  • Linuxlinux
  • macOSmacOS
  • Windowswindows

Supported platforms

  • Linux/Gtk (libayatana-appindicator3 or libappindicator3)
  • Windows XP or newer (shellapi.h)
  • MacOS (Cocoa/AppKit)

Prerequisites

  • CMake
  • Ninja, in order to have the same build commands on all platforms

Linux Dependencies

  • Arch

    sudo pacman -S libayatana-appindicator
  • Debian/Ubuntu

    sudo apt install libappindicator3-dev
  • Fedora

    sudo dnf install libappindicator-gtk3-devel

Building

mkdir -p build
cmake -G Ninja -B build -S .
ninja -C build

Demo

Execute the tray_example application:

./build/tray_example

Tests

Execute the tests application:

./build/tests/test_tray

API

Tray structure defines an icon and a menu.
Menu is a NULL-terminated array of items.
Menu item defines menu text, menu checked and disabled (grayed) flags and a
callback with some optional context pointer.

struct tray {
  char *icon;
  struct tray_menu *menu;
};

struct tray_menu {
  char *text;
  int disabled;
  int checked;

  void (*cb)(struct tray_menu *);
  void *context;

  struct tray_menu *submenu;
};
  • int tray_init(struct tray *) - creates tray icon. Returns -1 if tray icon/menu can't be created.
  • void tray_update(struct tray *) - updates tray icon and menu.
  • int tray_loop(int blocking) - runs one iteration of the UI loop. Returns -1 if tray_exit() has been called.
  • void tray_exit() - terminates UI loop.

All functions are meant to be called from the UI thread only.

Menu arrays must be terminated with a NULL item, e.g. the last item in the
array must have text field set to NULL.

License

This software is distributed under MIT license,
so feel free to integrate it in your commercial products.

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C47.3%CMake21.9%C++21.0%Objective-C8.1%Python1.7%
MIT License
Created March 17, 2026
Updated March 17, 2026