I love indicator applets almost as much as Emesene, the open-source MSN messenger app for Linux.
So when the latest update to the weekly PPA builds of the aforementioned chat app DISABLED support for its very useful indicator applet I…
Well, I had to find a way to re-enable it, folks.
Thankfully it wasn’t too had to do but it did require more effort than I anticipated.
I figured: “heh, I probably just need to uncomment a couple lines of code in a config file” or similar — not end up replacing the entire thing!
But first: why did Emesene’s devs disables such a useful feature in the first place?
They don’t feel that it’s stable enough. It’s their code so they know best, but personally speaking I’ve not had any issue with it.
And I’ve become too accustomed to the uniform behaviour indicator applets provide to go back to wildly inconsistent system tray menus.
So I worked out how to re-enable it.
Re-enable Indicator Applet in Emesene 1.6.x
I’m going to skip over the dull details on how I re-enable it and simply share a copy of my now-working trayicon.py file. Download this and replace yours with it (but make a backup first, okay).
Use Emesense from a PPA? Replace the file in /usr/share/emesene. If you use Emesene from source? Replace the one in the branch folder.
Note: when you update Emesene (either from source or PPA) the fixed file will be over-written — so keep a copy handy to re-replace if the indicator applet is still MIA in future builds.