keybase / keybase/client

Why does the tray icon not open the menubar immediately?

Open
#12,776 0 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Go
Stars
9.2k
Forks
1.3k
Avg merge
12h 58m
Merged PRs (30d)
56

Description

I'm using the Linux client. What bothers me is that if I want to open the application while it's running in the background I have to first click on the tray icon and then click the only option in the menu that shows up. It doesn't help that the option says _Show Keybase_ while what really gets shown is the menubar.

As a result, the workflow of opening the main application window is very unintuitive:
- _Show Keybase_ doesn't actually show the application,
- it's not immediately obvious how to open the application from the menubar,
- if what the user really wants to do is just bringing up the application on the page they left it on, they need to use yet another drop-down menu.

This means that the common action of bringing up the application window is hidden **four** clicks away (which most other applications can handle in just two).

A possible solution to this UX issue would be to:
- show the menubar immediately when left-clicked,
- include a button to simply open the application in there,
- show a usual context menu on right-click populated with the options from the current menu in the menubar.

I'm not sure if this would be straightforward to implement because the [current code](https://github.com/keybase/client/blob/dd8909a861c34a9b584d15c2fda27816f2f39a14/shared/desktop/app/menu-bar.desktop.js) responsible for the menubar seems to contain some workarounds that might make it more difficult.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start by reading shared/desktop/app/menu-bar.desktop.js and reproducing the Linux tray interaction described in the issue. Done means a left click opens the menubar immediately, the menubar includes a direct way to open the application, and right click provides the existing menu options as a context menu.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.