VirtualBox

Opened 17 years ago

Last modified 8 years ago

#93 new enhancement

Minimize main window to trayicon

Reported by: Ruhe Owned by:
Component: GUI Version: VirtualBox 1.3.6
Keywords: Cc:
Guest type: other Host type: other

Description (last modified by Frank Mehnert)

I would prefer it to minimize the VirtualBox main window to a trayicon instead of a taskbar entry (current behavior). Therefore it would be nice if there is an option to choose in which way the main window will be minimized.

Change History (20)

comment:1 by Frank Mehnert, 17 years ago

This would be a heavy dependency to the window manager. Or is there any common API shared between the global players (kwin, metacity, ...)?

comment:2 by trutwijd, 17 years ago

I second the vote for this - in the meantime you can use tools like KDocker to minimize any app to the system tray in KDE - sure there are similar apps for Windows, Gnome, etc.

Sylpheed has a nice plugin that does minimize to tray for pretty much any WM, so I would assume this can be done somehow.

Thanks,

Josh

comment:3 by Clifford, 16 years ago

I have to agree that VBox should have a "minimize to tray icon" feature. Even if the actual Virtual Machine windows don't have this functionality, at least the main application could be run from the tray. It is very confusing to users for the systems that I administer who I try to get using VBox because they are so used to closing Windows with the "X" at the top-right corner for windows that they are done using, so the tendency is to shut it down because they are "running VBox only once."

The default behavior of VBox is harder to get used to on a daily basis when you stop tinkering with it and actually use it to be productive.

However, as in most postings, I want to say how impressed and amazed I am at how incredible this product is! Keep up the good work!

in reply to:  description comment:4 by andres suarez, 16 years ago

there is an open source program that do this. Is RBTray http://rbtray.sourceforge.net/

Replying to Ruhe:

I would prefer it to minimize the "InnoTek VirtualBox" main window to a trayicon instead of a taskbar entry (current behaviour). Therefore it would be nice if there is an option to choose in which way the main window will be minimized.

comment:5 by Frank Mehnert, 16 years ago

Component: otherGUI

comment:6 by corz, 15 years ago

Minimize to tray is not something applications should be doing (aside from perhaps small accessories). There are many utilities that can do this for you; assuming you like this behaviour, you will presumably want to apply it to lots of applications on your system - are you gonna ask all the developers to adopt this?

Why not put your weight behind the request to have a minimize hotkey, so we can switch from full screen to a minimized state at a touch.

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2097

If you want tray-only action, you can easily add that yourself (a-la AllToTray, etc., etc.)

comment:7 by wacher, 15 years ago

corz, please :) tray icon =/= task bar

in reply to:  1 ; comment:8 by Toitoine, 15 years ago

Replying to frank:

This would be a heavy dependency to the window manager. Or is there any common API shared between the global players (kwin, metacity, ...)?

All functions are available and abstracted in QT class :

The QSystemTrayIcon class can be used on the following platforms:

  • All supported versions of Windows.
  • All window managers for X11 that implement the freedesktop.org system tray specification, including recent versions of KDE and GNOME.
  • Mac OS X, with the exception of showMessage()

This should be very simple to make it works.

in reply to:  8 comment:9 by Toitoine, 15 years ago

Update : I've see in the source code that the work is in progress : code within #ifdef VBOX_GUI_WITH_SYSTRAY

comment:10 by Technologov, 14 years ago

Added myself as CC.

-Technologov

comment:11 by Frank Mehnert, 14 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:12 by techtonik, 13 years ago

Add my to CC. I want a dot icon in the upper right corner of machine window to minimize it to systray on Windows.

comment:13 by Daevid Vincent, 13 years ago

This was requested FOUR years ago and still not implemented? Surely Oracle with their billions of dollars and teams upon teams of developers could implement this feature.

I too find it obnoxious that the VM takes up a task bar slot when my Unix VM is "dormant" 99% of the time during my daily LAMP development work and I either use Samba, SSH or Web to interface with the VM.

Come on Oracle, throw us a bone here. I'll make it easy, I don't care about any other host besides Windows. Even that would pacify a majority of people here I suspect.

comment:14 by Technologov, 13 years ago

Political answers:

  1. You're not paying customer. Those have separate support channels.
  2. Where is your patch ?

Technical answers:

  1. VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualizer, and doing system tray in Linux is very complex, due to incompatibility between KDE3, KDE4 and GNOME desktops.

-Technologov

comment:15 by Daevid Vincent, 13 years ago

And like I said, I don't care if they only support Windows hosts and not Linux. And VirtualBox is a FREE application. Not to mention, VMWare does this, so if for no other reason than to keep feature parity with their competition.

in reply to:  13 comment:16 by Michael Thayer, 13 years ago

Replying to DAE51D:

This was requested FOUR years ago and still not implemented?

I'm afraid that in the end, the development team decide on which features to implement, and so far I don't think that anyone considered this sufficiently important to implement. The fact that the people developing other virtualisation software disagreed here is not a sufficient reason for us to add a feature. As Technologov pointed out, all source code is available, and people who wish to add features that we don't consider important are free to do so (and we do have a track record of accepting reasonable contributions).

I too find it obnoxious that the VM takes up a task bar slot when my Unix VM is "dormant" 99% of the time during my daily LAMP development work and I either use Samba, SSH or Web to interface with the VM.

Perhaps you should use VBoxHeadless in that case? I must admit that I very rarely use Windows, but at least on Linux hosts it doesn't put anything into the task bar.

And VirtualBox is a FREE application.

Which doesn't change the fact that it cost money to develop and that we have paying customers whose needs obviously have high priority when we make development decisions.

comment:17 by Nachteule, 10 years ago

Aarghhh - 7 years now. Two icons bring a mess and the VBox taskbar icon is useless to 99%. Sure one could use VBoxHeadless, but a direct integration would be much better. I´m sure it would be pretty easy to implement. Did it with my vb6 apps 20 years ago with a few lines of code ...

comment:18 by Frank Mehnert, 10 years ago

So where is your patch for VirtualBox?

comment:19 by AS, 10 years ago

Linux - is Linux. Minimize to tray applications can not be allways relied on. In a small resource consumption desktop environments they are not reliable.

The feature absence is a pity. :/ Virt-Manager (KVM-QEmu, LibVirt) even have it. Oracle app - not!!! Unbelieveable.

comment:20 by SchemaCzar, 8 years ago

I have filed new request with more extensive specification as ticket 14655. This one should be obsolete.

By the way I love VirtualBox and am grateful that it's free!

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