[Electron] [Feature] taskbar cue on unread messages

[deutrino]

I am using Linux Mint 18.2 (my window manager is Cinnamon 3.4.6+sonya). When I get messages with the Electron app not in focus, notifications appear, but they are easy to miss. I would like it if some combination of highlighting the app in the taskbar, or adding (for example) an asterisk to the title, also happened. It's very easy for me to miss messages otherwise until I tab back to the app later for some other reason.

[abhn]

Is this fixed? I can see a count in the title bar which is the number of unread messages, which does solve the issue raised by op.

If this isn't fixed, would love to push a fix, but first need to understand the issue.

Edit: Sorry, I used the word issue instead of new feature.

[deutrino]

I can confirm this in Electron 1.0.27, but the intent of my feature request (which I wasn't clear about) - to get a visual cue on my taskbar - isn't fully accomplished. When there are enough items on the taskbar that the end of the app name gets cut off, the visual cue is no longer visible.

To address this, "(1) Signal" or "* Signal" would be great, another chat app I use does the latter.

Or, highlighting the app's taskbar entry when there are unread messages. I think I read elsewhere that this is difficult with Electron.

But strictly speaking, this feature is in.

[subsetpark]

I hope that it's not impossible to restore the highlighting functionality that was present in the nwjs version. In addition to the (1) title annotation, it would highlight the X window that Signal was in—in turn, for instance, on i3, both the container and the icon for the desktop window that the container is in are highlighted red. This makes an enormous difference, as it provides visual notification when the window is not visible.

[abhn]

@deutrino Yeah, that should be an easy fix, but as you mentioned, highlighting the taskbar is a much elegant solution.

@subsetpark Yes, I'll work on that. About the red highlighting, can you post a screenshot or point me to an image where that is happening. By container, do you mean a workspace? A little unsure how that will look like.

[subsetpark]

@abhn Here's a screen shot. First is the highlighted workspace (3) in the system bar:

Second, when you click through on the highlighted workspace, the window that emitted the notification is highlighted, also in red. Unfortunately the act of selecting a screen area de-highlights it, so it's a bit difficult to capture in action.

In this case the notification was emitted by clicked an HTTP URL in my mail client, which opened a new tab in Firefox. Since Firefox wasn't active, it emitted a notification.