Add tray option and allow to run valent in background without opening gui

[Iss-in]

2 separate but related feature requests, hopefully they can be added

Ist will be adding a tray icon for valent which can display all options as a drop down menu , including battery status, sending files and whatnot

another is that on running valent , GUI is opened, which is a bit inconvenient. if will be nice to have a --run-in-background or --tray flag to launch the binary

[andyholmes]

Ist will be adding a tray icon for valent which can display all options as a drop down menu , including battery status, sending files and whatnot

This sounds like #431, which I guess needs AppIndicator ported to GTK4.

another is that on running valent , GUI is opened, which is a bit inconvenient. if will be nice to have a --run-in-background or --tray flag to launch the binary

Activating the launcher will open the GUI, since otherwise there wouldn't really be a way to open it. Valent should auto-start with the session though, without opening the GUI.

The GNOME Shell extension can start/stop the service without opening the GUI, but that's only because it knows the special D-Bus incantations.

[Iss-in]

Valent should auto-start with the session though, without opening the GUI.

how does this work ? i dont see a systemctl service for it. Especially on non gnome environments

[andyholmes]

Valent has an XDG Autostart file that gets installed (ca.andyholmes.Valent.desktop).

If running in Flatpak, it should be installed by the XDG portal in ~/.config/autostart I believe. When installed on the host, it should end up in /etc/xdg/autostart. Maybe your system doesn't have support for the Background Portal?

[Iss-in]

yea that was the issue , sway doesnt support this , had to manually add

valent --gapplication-service

as a command to run on session startup as in desktop file. thanks