Evolution should minimize to Indicator Applet

[Ricardo Pérez López]

Binary package hint: indicator-applet

Evolution should minimize to Indicator Applet like Pidgin does now, i.e. when you click on Close or Minimize buttons in Evolution, it should "hides" inside Indicator Applet and disappears from the task bar. When you want to open the Evolution window again, you should only need to click on Indicator Applet -> Evolution Mail.

[Dominik George (natureshadow)]

I second this request!

[Julio A. Cervantes (julio)]

As do I!

[Joey-Elijah Sneddon (joey-elijah)]

Is there no hack-around to enable this?

[Christian Wilken (drwilken)]

I too second this request... ;)

[drr (drr)]

I too second this request. It would be nice to be able to minimise Evolution to tray, in a similar way as possible with Empathy.

[mahershalal (fabriek)]

Also seconded here.

[Martin Meyer (elreydetodo)]

I would also love to see Evolution able to do something like this, but it's not exactly an easy thing to do. Implementing this would mean that the mail checking system from Evolution needs to be pulled out of the UI (probably the entire mail account management system) and daemonized. The daemon would have to be able to run in your session (similar to how evolution-data-server does now) and regularly check your mail sources for new messages.

Evolution would have to re-think their association between accounts and various account-specific settings. Some of the things that are currently account-specific might have to become account-neutral in order for Evolution to properly integrate with this new daemon.

A dbus interface would be required for the mail checking service to notify various UIs (Evolution, indicator-applet, maybe even tinymail eventually?) of checking-mail and new-mail events. The service also needs to be able to handle check-account and check-all-accounts requests. Probably various other things too.

This is not even close to how Evolution is currently designed afaik. I'd love to see a bug filed upstream for this. It's a major app rewrite (what I propose is anyway). But wouldn't it be nice if mail clients other than Evolution could share account information and read messages from the same service and local datastore?

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

What about using Alltray or something similar?

http://alltray.trausch.us/

[Dominik George (natureshadow)]

> What about using Alltray or something similar?
>
Because having to use third-party software for an application that
claims to integrate perfectly with the GNOME desktop when it in fact
doesn't.

[Dominik George (natureshadow)]

+ [...] isn't an option.

[Cyberkilla (cyberkilla04uk-deactivatedaccount)]

Can't you just hide the window? I mean, if "alltray" can do it... Can't the entire window continue to be open, but unmapped and taken out of the taskbar? There is no need to actually close the window.

In Windows, you can hide a form in visual basic without actually closing it. Surely there is something in X capable of that.

[Dominik George (natureshadow)]

Cyberkilla schrieb:
> Can't you just hide the window? I mean, if "alltray" can do it... Can't
> the entire window continue to be open, but unmapped and taken out of the
> taskbar? There is no need to actually close the window.
>
> In Windows, you can hide a form in visual basic without actually closing
> it. Surely there is something in X capable of that.
>
>
Of course this is possible. But did you notice that this is exactly what
we are talking about right from the beginning?

[Cyberkilla (cyberkilla04uk-deactivatedaccount)]

@Dominik George: At what point does _anyone_ on this thread mention that it is possible to hide the window without closing it? That's right, nowhere. So don't get smart with me.

[Dominik George (natureshadow)]

Cyberkilla schrieb:
> @Dominik George: At what point does _anyone_ on this thread mention that
> it is possible to hide the window without closing it? That's right,
> nowhere. So don't get smart with me.
>
>
Bug reports are not a place to argue, but I should make this clear:

Minimizing an application to the system tray means *hiding* the window.
Closing it would mean loosing its functionality as well. Noone ever
wants to close a window when minimizing it to the tray, as long as they
really know what they are doing.

We are talkign about "closing" because "hiding" the window to the tray
is triggered by clicking the "close" button of the window.

[Cyberkilla (cyberkilla04uk-deactivatedaccount)]

@Dominik George: I don't think we quite understand each other. I was merely pointing out to the other guy that it is still possible and does not require Evolution to be split into UI and back-end mail daemons. The reason being, you should be able to hide the window without destroying it.

Personally, I look forward to this bug being fixed. I only recently discovered that Pidgin could hide inside of Indicator Applet - I upgraded from Jaunty and the default setting was "Always Show Tray Icon". The usefulness of the applet would increase 100 fold if I could get Evolution out of my taskbar. This functionality in Evolution has been a long time coming.

[MarcusM (dadis)]

I´m waiting for this feature for years. Now, that there is this new notification applet - which works very well wit empathy - this feature is more needed than ever ;)

[milan markovic (markovic-milan)]

i agree. would be very nice

[timex (timex)]

me too , I expend a few ours today looking how to do this !.

[cazacugmihai (cazacugmihai)]

+ 1 from my side

[deivid (deivid-rodriguez)]

One more request!

[Kiall Mac Innes (kiall)]

@Martin Meyer / #7 - Mostly correct! Your discussing what might be considered the ideal solution....

Dominik George / Cyberkilla are discussing a very possible and quite likely, a relatively simple solution (when is anything in software dev actually simple!...)

[Gabriel Shahzad (bbchunkwol)]

+1

I was using Alltray in 8.10 as a workaround, but it is just lame to use third party tools to bring functionality that should be there in the first place.

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

It sounds like evolution-data-server should probably handle the actual mail checking. There's no reason to have the evolution UI open just to check mail.

Am I correct that right now you need to have the evolution UI open at all times for the indicator to work at all?

To me, the whole point of having a mail indicator is to tell me whether or not I need to open a mail UI...

[Francisco (fbnaulin)]

This is needed and I hope possible.

[Andre (ajx)]

Evolution (and Thunderbird) bound to Indicator Applet and minimising to it (like Empathy, Gwibber, ....) would be consistent behaviour and is on my wishlist, too.

[MarcusM (dadis)]

Yeah, i also miss this feature also. I am sure the developers will find a way to implement this, also it seems to be a lot of work (#7 and #21).

[coldReactive (coldreactive)]

+1 to this as well, would be nice if evolution could minimize to indicator.

[Alexey Nedilko (alexey.nedilko)]

Could everyone please stop this "+1 from me" flood in comments? These comments are of zero value for developers, and there's a dedicated "Affects me too" feature in LP for that purpose.

[Geoff Goehle (goehle)]

just as a proof of concept I've modified the source for the applet so that evolution runs hidden in the background, even when there is no visible window. Its a hack, and just mainly meant to show that it can be done, but I've attached the .diff for evolution-indicator.c as a curiosity. (PS. This is the first time I've edited source like this, so be warned. Its terrible. I know its terrible, so don't bother telling me its terrible.)

[coldReactive (coldreactive)]

@Alexey: Then make a spam report system for launchpad.

[Taylor "Ripps" LeMasurier-Wren (ripps818)]

@Geoff
I tried applying that patch to the evolution-indicator source in Lucid, but it doesn't work, in fact I breaks the code. I looked at the patch, but I can't make sense of what functions it's trying to edit. Could you try posting a patch using diff.

[Geoff Goehle (goehle)]

@Taylor: I think the problem is that I hard coded in the path to evolution when I was using exec, but I was using a custom build of evolution so the path may not be the same. I'm using execlp now, so maybe that won't be a problem. I really should be using something else to start a new evolution window, but don't know what. I've attached the diff file, in any case. Let me know if I can be more help.