Set custom system tray icon with custom context menu for your application

Introduction

Modern operating systems usually provide a special area on the desktop, called the system tray or notification area, where long-running applications can display icons and short messages. These icons can also be customized to show short context menus for additional functionality.

Qt framework has native support to add tray icons using the class QSystemTray. In this tutorial, we will see how can we implement system tray icon with custom context menu for our application with just couple of lines of code.

Code

Before we use the QSystemTray class we need to make sure we have a .ico file which we need to set as an icon for our application. A .ico file is nothing but an icon file. You can convert your .png or .jpg image into .ico file using online converters like this. Once we have the .ico file ready, we can either add it to our resource(.rc) file of our application if available.

With a couple of lines of code as shown below, we can create a tray icon with a custom menu for our application ready.

// create system tray icon
// assuming you have added .ico file to your resource .rc file
// otherwise, provide a relative path to it
QSystemTrayIcon* trayIcon = new QSystemTrayIcon(QIcon(":/path/to/your/.ico file"), this);

// add tray icon menu actions
QMenu* trayMenu = new QMenu(this);
trayMenu->addAction("Show");
trayMenu->addAction("Exit");

// set menu on the system tray icon
trayIcon->setContextMenu(trayMenu);

// show tray icon
m_systemTrayIcon->show();

Conclusion

The above piece of code will create a tray icon and when you right-click on it you would have your custom context menu displayed for you. If this was helpful, please share this blog, and also feel free to add your thoughts or comments below.

Photo by Ben Schnell on Unsplash