How to skip Zorin taskbar

General Help
7

I moved from Gnome to XFCE4 and when the devs for XFCE pulled the “Our users say that they want CSD’s (we so did not) and it’s good for you just take it” and the “We put it to a vote with our development team…” and their devs said, “No you did not! We got no vote, you voted between you two lead developers and told us your plan” trick, I left XFCE for Cinnamon.
I installed Cinnamon on Zorin and it runs like an absolute champ. It does not bog down after using it for a while, at all. For clarity, I must point out that I do not have Gnome-Shell installed on my machine, backport or otherwise.
I can see a great deal to like about Gnome. But, I do have a principle in things that disallows me from supporting certain treatment of users…
In this topic, the loss of user control and functionality, the removal of many features is what I dislike about Gnome. Some can argue that the resultant extensions creates a benefit. I could argue that extensions can be made in other environments, then.
Perhaps another user who is less biased toward Gnome than I am can chime in with good strong pointers on how to manipulate the Gnome Panel. After a few months of trying, I gave up on the Gnome Panel and installed an alternative one.

8

Depends what you want to do - there are a lot of useful extensions out there - Numlock, Capslock, Ctrl key indicator, text scaler, weather apps, system monitors.
And from an accessibility (screenreader) view, Gnome CANNOT be beaten! :wink:

9

And from an accessibility (screenreader) view, Gnome CANNOT be beaten!

Not even by MS Windows? :wink:

10

Well if people want to waste money then £600 for JAWS (which is what Orca in Gnome does for free), then no! :wink:

11

There used to be a time when Microsoft made an OS for you, but the last time that was done, was back when Windows 7 came out. However, Microsoft has always been known for leaving back doors open for them since the 90’s with Windows 95, 98, 2000, as well as XP in 2001.

But the reason that didn’t matter to us back then, is because our firewall software that we were using, blocked all non authorized incoming and outgoing communication across the internet. Microsoft knew of this, so they went hard at work to figure out how to get around it.

By the time Windows 10 came around, they had their eyeballs in every single segment of the OS. And by including their own firewall software, prevents you from using a 3rd parties. And thus, there is nothing to stop Microsoft from spying on you.

Microsoft whole greedy game, is to sell your information to the highest bidder. There OS no longer was made for you, its made for them, and their bottom line. They report anything you do, anything you say, anything you look at. All of it is stored in data centers and shared with 0 security.

People wonder why identity theft and ransomeware got on the rise in latest years. Yeah, thats cause you got companies like Microsoft storing all your information in data centers! So be warned, if you choose to stick with Microsoft, you are signing away your rights and freedoms.

Just saying… Linux gives you choice.

12

Thanks Guys, but I would have been happier with some kind of gnome-extension to decide what I want to display on the taskbar and what I don’t. Maybe I’ll write one …

Robi, if you find (or write) a Gnome extension that provides the purpose you are looking for, could you please share it here?

13

The following page has a few solutions that should work in GNOME:

I’ve personally tested the Devilspie2 solution and it worked.
The taskbar supports the skip_taskbar window parameter so any solution that can apply that parameter to a window is supported.
Usually the parameter is set by the application itself when necessary which is in fact how the desktop background window avoids showing up in the taskbar.

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14

Of course. That’s what I tried:

  • Do: xprop | grep "CLASS" and click on the window you want to remove from taskbar.
  • This will return something like WM_CLASS(STRING) = "name", "name"
  • Make a program startup script or run once, depending on your preference: wmctrl -x -r name.name -b add,skip_taskbar

Source: https://askubuntu.com/questions/646346/xfce-hiding-an-application-from-the-taskbar

It works in a terminal, but the window only disappears from the taskbar when I close the terminal. It works as a shortcut when the terminal is enabled (not displayed). Does not work from autostart … yet …

1 Like
15

Whenever I wanted to run a terminal process in the background so I could close the terminal window, I either hit ctrl+z and then entered in "bg"
Or I put in the command followed with "& disown"

16

@zorink, thank you very much for your help!

17

I tried, but ctrl + z doesn’t make sense because the command returns the prompt. It is likely that the window to be disabled only disappeared when I closed the terminal, because then the taskbar was updated.

18

This is one of the reasons why I have been using Linux since 2003 …

19

I used to use it all the time on Zorin 12.4. I assure you it worked. But since I moved to Zorin 15, the need for that was eliminated by the new environment being better able to handle the scripts I was running without having to launch them from terminal. So, I wonder if something changed between Xenial and Bionic. I have not used it at all on Zorin 15.
What about the "disown" property?

20

Same. Only if I close the terminal will it disappear …

21

Can you run the command from alt+F2?

22

No. Or, if I open another window after that, yes. So it looks like the taskbar needs to be updated in some way after running the command …

23

If you’re running the command in a Terminal window you would need to reload Gnome Shell (Alt +F2 then enter r as the command and press Enter). This is because the taskbar isn’t be able to pick up changes to the properties of existing windows.

24

Thanks, meanwhile I also realized that it works:

wmctrl -x -r tzclock.Tzclock -b add, skip_taskbar && gnome-shell-extension-tool -r zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com

(Tzclock can be any other application of course).

25

So this is how it works for me:

tzclock & sleep 2 && wmctrl -x -r tzclock.Tzclock -b add,skip_taskbar && gnome-shell-extension-tool -r zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com

I put this in a bash script and placed it in autostart.

26

Hey guys! Final code completed:

   #!/bin/bash
   tzclock &
   while :
   do
     result=$(wmctrl -l -x | grep tzclock.Tzclock 2>&1 | wc -l)
     if [ $result -eq 1 ]; then
       break
     fi
   done
   wmctrl -x -r tzclock.Tzclock -b add,skip_taskbar && gnome-shell-extension-tool -r zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com
2 Likes