I have been doing quite a bit of research & tweaking of my dwm (debian and arch-based) installations over the past several weeks. In the process of this work, I have made a few interesting ‘finds’. If you are seeking some handy systray applications, these may be ‘just wat the doctored ordered.’

Note: These applications all run with or without systemd.

Among my systray application finds are:

• udiskie (a small application) which ‘magically’ mounts plugged-in devices. If you activate udiskie as part of your booting process with the -t option (udiskie -t &) you will get a handy system tray icon. This icon lists any mounted usb/sdram/etc devices and also allows you to safely dismount or simply stop mounted drives.
• psensor is a useful application for monitoring hardware sensors. This application provides a tray icon (with alarm coloring) to help you manage temperatures, fans and memory consumption/ tracking.
• fluxgui is a day/ night screen color shifting application. It provides the facility for you to easily tweak and tune your screen’s day/night shifts manually via postal code. For those whose auto geolocation is always inaccurate because of your ISP (like me) this is wonderful. Note: Fluxgui is quite similar to redshift.
• caffeine (caffeine-ng) is an application that temporarily prevents the activation of both screen saver and “sleep” power-saving mode. This is activated via simple mouse click and allows your machine to stay ‘awake’ while you have it performing unattended tasks.
• xfce4-power-manager offers complete and reliable (to my mind) power management functionality. It includes the option to access the power managemnt functions via the systray for the purpose of such things as adjusting screen brightness, determining battery charge (laptop & mouse).
• volumeicon is a quick, convenient tool for activating/ adjusting system audio functions (mute, sound level, sound settings, etc.).

Making these applications is quite simple. Obviously they must first be installed. Then, if you are using a window manager (with autostart scripts) or .xprofile or .xsessionrc as part of your desktop autostart/ “system start” routines you can use the following commands (these are the commands I use to invoke the above functions):

# Caffeine
 /usr/bin/caffeine &
# Light shift
 fluxgui &
# set sound functions
 volumeicon &
# power related functions
 xfce4-power-manager &
# Udikie
 udiskie -t &
# run sensors
 psensor &

The ‘ultimate’ beauty of all of the above are that these applications are light-weight (by my definition), portable across arch & debian distros, and easy to use/ access.

Enjoy!