Hello

How is an icon associated with an application so that it is displayed in Xfce's "Task List" and "Cycle windows" (the one that shows on Alt+Tab)?

I'd like to know the general mechanism and specifically how it can be done for urxvt.

Regards the general mechanism I've searched the freedesktop.org specifications and the Xfce WIKI but not been enlightened. I also looked into the MIME-info database but found only information about non-executable files ???

Regards urxvt, I've tried:

• urxvt command options -xrm iconFile:<path-to-icon-file> and --iconName=<path-to-icon-file>.
• ~/.local/share/applications/urxvt.desktop with an Icon= line (valid, as shown in the resulting menu entry) with StartupNotify set to both true and false.

Nothing has worked and the icon shown is, AFAIK, Xfce's default window icon, not the specified ones or urxvt's ... or it could be urxvt's ... ? It's attached.

Best

Charles

Attached Images

 

I think you can do this if you have a launcher for the application in the task bar. Unless I'm mistaken it's just right click on the launcher, then in the dialogue box, click on the icon. You can then choose one of the standard icons, or use one that you have drawn with inkscape for instance. When the app shows in the task list it should have the icon from the launcher.

Thanks impert but I do have a launcher and normally start urxvt with it. Its icon is valid because it shows in the panel but it is not shown in the Task List or in the Cycle Windows window.

After further research and tentatively ...

If Xfce conforms to X Desktop Group standards and assuming the Task List icon is provided by the window manager then then it is not the .desktop files that define the icon (they are only used when displaying menu items) but the application itself which may pass hints to the window manager including _NET_WM_ICON for icon(s).

Regards rxvt-unicode (a.k.a urxvt), a patch to add _NET_WM_ICON functionality was discussed in this October 08 rxvt-unicode mailing-list thread (if viewing it is helpful to sort messages by thread) and added in the 9.06 release. It requires ENABLE_FRILLS set during build.

Regards the SlackBuild of rxvt-unicode 9.07 for Slackware 13.0, --enable-frills is used in the configure step so setting the icon via the -icon option and possibly -name option ought (TM) to work. As already described it does not under Slackware 13.0 and Slackware 13.1 running Xfce.

rxvt-unicode 9.09 was released yesterday so further investigation is deferred until that is installed.

. Oops. When I posted before I hadn't noticed that my home-grown icons didn't show in the Task List. Backup I start and then walk away from, the others are "places", so Nautilus or Thunar shows instead.

Thanks for the update

There's another app that doesn't tell xfwm4 which icon to display: PysolFC.

Solved for urxvt with the help of Facundo Andrés Bianco and James Cloos on the rxvt-unicode mailing list.

After installing libAfterImage 1.18 (source linked in the SlackBuild not available so downloaded via mirror list) and rebuilding urxvt (9.10 but would probably have worked equally well for any recent version), urxvt's -icon option became available and effective.