On Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 5:51 PM Björn Bidar via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors wrote: > Ship Mints writes: > > > On Fri, Apr 4, 2025 at 7:44 AM Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > >> > From: Ship Mints > >> > Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2025 07:37:57 -0400 > >> > Cc: 77496@debbugs.gnu.org > >> > > >> > P.S. All this doesn't change the fact that we can only install this > >> > feature when it can be made available on free systems. > >> > > >> > This feature exists in GNUstep. Is this not sufficiently free? > >> > >> I mean the underlying OS. > >> > > > > GNUstep on Linux would do. > > > >> If you think we really need complete parity with Linux desktop systems > >> beyond GNUstep, based on some > >> > research this morning, we may be able to leverage dbus messages for > >> desktops that support for "count" > >> > (numeric only, sheesh) / "count-visible". This functionality appears > >> not to be tied to the running process as on > >> > macOS/GNUstep but to a "URL" like "application://{appname}.desktop" > >> where I guess appname would be > >> > emacs or Emacs, I dunno yet how this really works when there are more > >> than one running copies of an app > >> > process. I'll experiment and see if I can tease this out. > >> > > >> > If this seems easy and you're 100% adamant that GNUstep is > >> insufficiently free, I can try to craft a more > >> > generic API that supports numeric counts for Linux desktop shells, and > >> text labels for macOS/GNUstep. > >> > >> I'd be surprised if X and/or GTK don't have a comparable feature. So > >> yes, I think we should have something similar on GNU/Linux. > >> > > > > Seems not. Seems to be a feature of desktop shells. > > > > Not getting any love from trying 'gdbus' to force an app badge. I'm > surely > > just an ignorant boob with dbus. > > > > For anyone interested in helping out, this is the hack I'm trying, which, > > if it worked, we'd model in Emacs invoking dbus directly vs. via command > > line. > > > > Which desktop environment do you use? It seems that at least KDE Plasma > and Unity support this API. I assume that also applies to GNOME Shell at > least under Ubuntu. > I've been experimenting with Ubuntu. The app icon badge protocol is implemented in the gnome-shell dock extension (this is a brittle methodology in several ways but that's what we have to work with). I have been unable to make it work, however. It seems that despite the gjs dock code appearing to contain the dbus subscriptions, d-spy doesn't show the endpoint and dbus command-line tools also suggest the subscription isn't working. I ain't no dbus expert and this has been a tad frustrating, to say the least. That there is no "BDFL" in the Linux desktop ecosystem definitely shows. Does your gnome-shell dock properly react to com.canonical.Unity.LauncherEntry.Update signals?