Ayatana System Indicator — Session

About Ayatana Indicators

The Ayatana Indicators project is the continuation of Application Indicators and System Indicators, two technologies developed by Canonical Ltd. for the Unity7 desktop.

Application Indicators are a GTK implementation of the StatusNotifierItem Specification (SNI) that was originally submitted to freedesktop.org by KDE.

System Indicators are an extensions to the Application Indicators idea. System Indicators allow for far more widgets to be displayed in the indicator's menu.

The Ayatana Indicators project is the new upstream for application indicators, system indicators and associated projects with a focus on making Ayatana Indicators a desktop agnostic technology.

On GNU/Linux, Ayatana Indicators are currently available for desktop envinronments like MATE (used by default in Ubuntu MATE), XFCE (used by default in Xubuntu, LXDE, and the Budgie Desktop).

The Lomiri Operating Environment (UI of the Ubuntu Touch OS, formerly known as Unity8) uses Ayatana Indicators for rendering its notification area and the UBports project is a core contributor to the Ayatana Indicators project.

For further info, please visit: https://ayatana-indicators.org

The Session Ayatana System Indicator

The -session Ayatana System Indicator is the session menu indicator for Unity7, MATE and Lomiri (optionally for others, e.g. XFCE, LXDE). Its behavior and features are listed at https://wiki.ayatana-indicators.org/AyatanaIndicatorSession

Notes for Client Renderers

Ayatana Indicator Session has two custom menuitems: the Guest and User switchers. As per the https://wiki.ayatana-indicators.org/AyatanaIndicatorSession specification, both need four visual components: (1) an Active Session Mark, the user's (2) icon, (3) name, and (4) a Logged-In Mark.

User menuitems have "x-ayatana-type" set to "indicator.user-menu-item"

Their four visual components are determined by:

1. You can test for the Action Session Mark by checking the action's state. The state is a dicionary whose "active-user" key yields the current session's owner's username. If it matches the username in this menuitem's "target" attribute, show the Active Session Mark.

2. The icon is stored in the menuitem's "icon" attribute. If none is set, the client should use a fallback icon such as "avatar-default."

3. The name is stored in the menuitem's "label" attribute.

4. You can test for the Logged In Mark by checking the action's state. The state is a dictionary whose "logged-in-users" key will give an array of usernames. If the array contains the username in this menuitem's "target" attribute, show the Logged In Mark.

The Guest switcher has "x-ayatana-type" set to "indicator.guest-menu-item" action

Its four visual components are determined by:

1. You can test for the Active Session Mark by checking the action's state. The state is a dictionary whose "is-active" key yields a boolean. If the boolean is true, show the Active Session Mark.

2. The guest user should use a fallback icon such as "avatar-default."

3. The name ("Guest") is stored in the menuitem's "label" attribute.

4. You can test for the Logged In Mark by checking the action's state. The state is a dictionary whose "is-logged-in" key yields a boolean. If the boolean is true, show the Logged In Mark.

License and Copyright

See COPYING and AUTHORS file in this project.

Building and Testing

For instructions on building and running built-in tests, see the INSTALL.md file.