Make more obvious when not connected to Syncthing

[JohnVeness]

Relevant components

• Standalone tray application (based on Qt Widgets)
• Plasmoid/applet for Plasma desktop
• Dolphin integration
• Command line tool (syncthingctl)
• Integrated Syncthing instance (libsyncthing)
• Android app or mobile UI in general
• Backend libraries

Is your feature request specific to a certain platform/environment? Please specify.
KDE Plasma 6.3.4.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
After a while using my laptop, I realised that Syncthing wasn't working. On closer inspection, SyncthingTray was showing a greyed-out icon, but at a quick glance, that wasn't particularly noticeable. Hovering over the icon brought up a tooltip saying it was disconnected, but if I clicked quickly I wouldn't see that. The main window mostly looked OK. Admittedly it did have Connect and Start buttons at the top, rather than Pause, but that wasn't very obvious, to me at least!

Describe the solution you'd like
I would have expected there to be more of a "fuss" made about SyncthingTray not being connected to Syncthing. Rather than just greying out the icon, maybe it should have an overlay warning badge on the icon too. (Indeed, at the moment I have "No remote device connected" and there is an X badge over the icon, but not connecting to Syncthing at all seems like a situation that should be even more brought to the user's attention not, as it seems currently, less attention with just the greyed-out icon).

I also noticed that while in this state, the list of folders looked fine - just saying "Up to Date". Again, I would have expected a warning message there.

Maybe in addition to icon changes while in this state, there should also be a banner at the top of the main window, that couldn't be overlooked if someone clicked on the icon wondering what was going on.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Paying more attention!

Additional context
Thanks for SyncthingTray :)

[Martchus]

I guess the usefulness of making this more obvious depends on whether you consider it normal for Syncthing to be stopped from time to time or not. It makes sense to stop Syncthing temporarily when the network connection is metered or to save system resources.

You could already tweak this in the settings:

• Make the icon color e.g. red for the disconnected state.
• Enable the notification for a disconnect from Syncthing.

I guess I could extend the config so one can make the icon somewhat more noticeable.

It is true that Syncthing Tray just keeps its state on disconnects but that's more a feature then a bug. I suppose displaying some kind of notice wouldn't hurt, though.

Let's see when I'll find the time to improve this.

[TeutonJon78]

I also think it could be helpful to have some different states for the icons. I mostly use syncthing for syncing a few files to my mobile devices, so I don't leave it running on those devices constantly, but it's always on for the desktop. And since no devices are connected, the icon is grey with an x over it, which would seem to say "not working" to me, rather than idle but still connected to the local instance.

When there is no syncthing running, the icon is just grey with no x, which graphically makes it seem "less bad" than just not having any active clients. Maybe at a minimum the icons for those two states should be switched?

[Martchus]

And since no devices are connected, the icon is grey with an x over it, which would seem to say "not working" to me, rather than idle but still connected to the local instance.

If being not connected to other devices is a normal situation and you therefore don't want the bad-looking "X" I suggest you uncheck "No remote device connected" in the connection settings.

Maybe at a minimum the icons for those two states should be switched?

Maybe. However, when I first developed Syncthing Tray and decided how the icons should look like I often temporarily stopped Syncthing to save resources on my not so powerful laptop. So not being connected at all was normal. When the connection to Syncthing is lost unexpectedly one still gets a notification (if enabled) so it seemed ok if the icon for that state is rather unobtrusive. That would speak for keeping the icons as-is. In addition, people might be used to the current icons so switching them now might cause more confusion.

One thing I can definitely do is making those two different disconnected states use distinctly configurable icon types. This way one can configure different colors (e.g. and obtrusive "red" for being not connected at all).

[TeutonJon78]

If being not connected to other devices is a normal situation and you therefore don't want the bad-looking "X" I suggest you uncheck "No remote device connected" in the connection settings.

Ah, I didn't see/understand that part of the options. That's actually a cool way to handle those two states, and makes it more configurable based on use cases.

[xgdgsc]

Today I encountered once the syncthing process is down(might because of updating) while the tray icon is still green.

[Martchus]

Ok, but with that little info there's not much I can do about it. Maybe it missed or wrongly processed some event from Syncthing.