The Cosmonic Tray

Cosmonic Desktop is three cooperating pieces:

• The app—the graphical control panel you open when you want to look at things. Launch-on-demand; closing it stops nothing.
• The cosmonicd daemon—the per-user service that actually runs your workloads.
• The tray—cosmonic-tray, a small native menu-bar/system-tray companion. It's the always-resident piece: a native binary a fraction of the app's size, so daemon status stays a glance away without keeping the full app open.

What it does

The tray icon reflects daemon state live—bright while the daemon is up, dim when it's stopped, with brief animations for starting, deploys, activity, and errors. It's push-driven over the daemon's event stream, so it sits idle (no polling) while connected.

Its menu and status panel handle the essentials without opening the app: a daemon status line with workload counts, Open Control Panel (launches the app), Start/Stop/Restart the daemon (via the same per-platform service mechanism the app uses), a Start on login toggle, shortcuts for settings, logs, docs, and feedback—and Quit Cosmonic Tray, which exits only the tray; the daemon and your workloads keep running.

The tray also checks the release feed for app updates (every four hours; honoring the same opt-outs as the app). When it has genuinely seen a newer version it shows an Update available item and one OS notification per version—clicking either opens the app at Settings → Updates. The tray itself never downloads or installs anything.

How it runs

The tray is installed with the app and registered to start at login—a CosmonicTray.app LaunchAgent on macOS, a cosmonic-tray.exe Run-key entry on Windows, and an XDG autostart entry for cosmonic-tray on Linux. It talks to the daemon over the same peer-checked local socket (named pipe on Windows) as the app: no network listener, no elevation, no new privileges—just another same-user client of the daemon's API.

cosmonicd uninstall stops the tray and deregisters its login entry along with the daemon's.

No tray icon on GNOME?

GNOME needs the AppIndicator extension to show tray icons—see Troubleshooting. Packaged installs also bundle an optional GNOME Shell extension (gnome-extensions enable cosmonic-tray@cosmonic.com) that gives the tray a first-class top-bar button with single-click access to the status panel.