Description

A simple script to create custom launchers in the system tray. Confirmed to work on Linux under Debian XFCE, may require some small tweaks to run in other DEs/macOS/Windows.

What this is not

This is not a complex way to manage applications. Although there is a very basic check to see if a launched process is still running, the intent of this project is not to manage application state or perform complex operations.

No CLI/GUI support is provided out of the box for multiple reasons, with the main one being that I do not need these features myself.

Installation

Download the repository/script and install the requirements.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Run

Simply change the variables in the script and run it.

Variables

Option	Description
LAUNCH_ONLY (use with caution)	If the command provided will only be launched or if it will be treated as a standalone application that can be started/stopped
ICON_ACTIVE	Path to icon to be displayed when app has been launched
ICON_INACTIVE	Path to icon to be displayed when the app is not running. Optional if LAUNCH_ONLY is set to True
ICON_WARNING	Path to icon to be displayed when a process is identified to have crashed/stopped running unexpectedly. Optional if LAUNCH_ONLY is set to True
PROCESS	Process to launch - note the subprocess.Popen syntax
STOP_PROCESS (untested/experimental)	Command to stop process. If not provided, the process PID will be killed. Note the subprocess.Popen syntax

TODO

Nothing to do so far. I put this script together to solve a need I had, and decided to make it open source. There are many places where it can be improved but it works well enough for me.