How do I add/remove an entry in the Indicator Applet in Gnome?

Question

I can't seem to find a guide or reference on how to configure the 'indicator-applet' (aka MessagingMenu) that came about in the 9.04 release of Ubuntu. It's that little mail icon that lists messaging apps.

I can find docs about what it should do, people complaining about how it works, references that the API changed in 9.10, but not much on how to change the configuration.

The MessagingMenu design spec page says that the config file should be at $HOME/.config/indicators/messages/applications/, but there's nothing there on my install (9.10).

Solution

According to dirs.h, there can be a directory indicators/messages/applications-blacklist, which will be treated as a subdirectory of your user config directory ($HOME/.config by default).

I don't think this directory would be created by default, but you can create it yourself. It looks like you'd need to restart the indicator service (log out/log in) after creating that directory.

Each file there will be loaded to read a path to a .desktop file. So I guess you can put a text file with the full path to the launcher of the application you want to ignore in there.

I believe these paths should come from /usr/share/indicators/messages/applications.

Comments

[Suppressingfire]

So you want to know how to post your own information to the applet?

[moneyt]

Post would be great, but the first step (for me) would be just getting rid of the applications I don't use (without uninstalling them).

[moneyt]

Love it, 2.5K view, not a single upvote.

[moneyt]

Should possibly be moved to askubuntu now?

[moneyt]

@Diago, yeah, I get mass migration being bad, just seemed that this is so specifically Ubuntu (even to the version), that it would be better over there. But if that's the way it is right now, I'll not buck the system and repost.

[moneyt]

Exactily what I was looking for - just linked the shared entires (that I wanted to remove) from /usr/share/indicators/messages/applications to the blacklist directory. I assume that the $HOME/.config/indicators/messages/applications/ directory can be created as well, to add launchers.