Syncthing Tray

Qt 5-based tray application for Syncthing

Supported platforms

• Designed to work under any desktop environment supported by Qt 5 with tray icon support
• No desktop environment specific libraries required
• Tested under
  • Plasma 5
  • Openbox/qt5ct/Tint2
  • Cinnamon
  • Windows 10
• Can be shown as regular window if tray icon support is not available

Features

• Provides quick access to most frequently used features but does not intend to replace the official web UI
  • Check state of directories and devices
  • Check current traffic statistics
  • Display further details about direcoties and devices, like last file, last scan, ...
  • Display ongoing downloads
  • Trigger re-scan of a specific directory or all directories at once
  • Open a directory with the default file browser
  • Pause/resume a specific device or all devices at once
• Shows Syncthing notifications
• Does not allow configuring Syncthing itself (currently I do not intend to add this feature as it could cause more harm than good when not implemented correctly)
• Can read the Syncthing configuration file for quick setup when just connecting to local instance
• Provides an option to conveniently add the tray to the applications launched when the desktop environment starts
• Can launch Syncthing when started and display stdout/stderr (useful under Windows)
• Provides quick access to the official web UI
  • Utilizes either Qt WebKit or Qt WebEngine
  • Can be built without web view support as well (then the web UI is opened in the regular browser)
• Allows quickly switching between multiple Syncthing instances
• Features a simple command line utility syncthingctl to check Syncthing status and trigger rescan/pause/resume/restart

Planned features

The tray is still under development; the following features are planned:

• Show recently processed items
• Improve notification handling
• Create Plasmoid for Plasma 5 desktop

Screenshots

Under Openbox/Tint2

Under Plasma 5

Settings dialog

Web view

Hotkey for Web UI

To create a hotkey for the web UI, you can use the same approach as for any other application. Just add --webui to the arguments to trigger the web UI. Syncthing Tray ensures that no second instance will be spawned if it is already running.

Download / binary repository

I currently provide packages for Arch Linux (see AUR) and Windows (see my website). Sources for those packages can be found in a separate repository. .

Build instructions

The application depends on c++utilities and qtutilities and is built the same way as these libaries. For basic instructions checkout the README file of c++utilities. For building this straight, see the next section.

The following Qt 5 modules are requried: core network gui widgets svg webenginewidgets/webkitwidgets

Building this straight

0. Install (preferably the latest version of) g++ or clang, the required Qt 5 modules and CMake.

1. Get the sources. For the lastest version from Git clone the following repositories:

   cd $SOURCES
   git clone https://github.com/Martchus/cpp-utilities.git
   git clone https://github.com/Martchus/qtutilities.git
   git glone https://github.com/Martchus/syncthingtray.git
   git clone https://github.com/Martchus/subdirs.git
   

2. Build and install everything in one step:

   cd $BUILD_DIR
   cmake \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/install/prefix" \
    $SOURCES/subdirs/syncthingtray
   make install -j$(nproc)
   

Select Qt module for WebView

• If Qt WebKitWidgets is installed on the system, the tray will link against it. Otherwise it will link against Qt WebEngineWidgets.
• To force usage of Qt WebKit/Qt WebEngine or to disable both add -DWEBVIEW_PROVIDER=webkit/webengine/none to the CMake arguments.

BTW: I still prefer the deprecated Qt WebKit because

• Currently there is no way to allow a particular self-signed certificate in Qt WebEngine. Currently any self-signed certificate is accepted! See: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-51176
• Qt WebEngine can not be built with mingw-w64.
• Qt WebEngine is more buggy in my experience.
• Security issues are not a concern because no other website than the Syncthing web UI is shown. Any external links will be opened in the regular web browser anyways.