Waybar

Waybar is a bar with a list of open applications, widgets, clock, tray and system statuses. It is highly configurable and popular among the Wayland community.

When a user opens an application, its icon is displayed in Waybar. Wayland will announce the application id, app_id, to Waybar, and this ID is used to look up the corresponding icon from a .desktop file. However, this can fail in two instances:

1. The icon given in the .desktop file for that application cannot be found.
2. Waybar is not given an app_id, so lookup is impossible.

When an icon could not be loaded, the previous default behaviour of Waybar was to display nothing. There would thus not be a visual indicator that there was in fact an application open, so it was in some sense "hiding" in plain sight.

I made a Pull Request to Waybar where I fixed this behaviour, so that a default fallback icon would be used.

A screenshot of what Waybar might look like, and a before and after screenshot of the icon missing vs it instead using a fallback.