No tooltip when mouse over tray icon on Linux

[unv-unv]

PolterType version

0.30.0

OS and desktop environment

Debian 13 KDE Wayland

How did you install it?

AppImage (Linux)

Keyboard layouts involved

en-US + ru-RU

Anything unusual in your input stack?

keyd + InputActions

What happened, and what did you expect?

Each application shows tooltip on tray icon with application name and some status. PolterType doesn't have it.

Log excerpt

Relevant config.toml excerpt (optional)

[vstrelnikof]

Half of this is fixed in v0.32.0. The other half is not ours to fix yet, so I am leaving the issue open.

You were right that it was missing rather than merely plain: PolterType had been writing a tooltip on every state change and throwing it away. tray-icon, the crate that built our tray, has set_tooltip as an empty function on Linux — in the version we pin and in the five released since — so the icon has never had hover text on any Linux desktop. It now builds the indicator itself and fills in the StatusNotifierItem ToolTip property a panel actually reads, with what Windows and macOS have shown all along: the layout, whether switching is paused, whether the keyboard hook is missing, and how many drafts are waiting. Verified on KDE Plasma Wayland — hovered and photographed, PolterType — en-US beside the icon.

The catch is the library underneath. That API arrived in libayatana-appindicator 0.6.0, and Debian 13 ships 0.5.94 — so do Debian sid and every current Ubuntu; only Debian experimental has 0.6.0. On 0.5.94 the functions do not exist at all: PolterType looks for them once at startup, does not find them, and leaves the tray exactly as it was. The AppImage does not rescue you either, because it bundles its own copy of that library from the machine that built it, and that copy is 0.5.94 too.

So on Debian 13 with the AppImage you will not see a difference yet, and I would rather say so than close this. What closes it is putting a newer library inside the AppImage — a packaging decision, and the next thing on this issue.

One change you will see either way: the item now identifies itself as poltertype with the title PolterType, instead of tray-icon tray app and a lower-cased process name, so Plasma names it properly in the hidden-items list. If your panel had remembered whether to show the icon, it may treat it as a new item once.

[unv-unv]

You closed this issue, but I still see no tooltip in 0.32.1. Do I need to wait for a new Debian version to fix this?