gteatime -- A lightweight GTK 3 system-tray tea and coffee timer

gteatime (tea & coffee timer) is a GTK 3 systray timer for tea and coffee presets written in C. It avoids GtkStatusIcon and libappindicator. The tray integration first tries StatusNotifierItem over D-Bus using GIO, then falls back to the XEmbed system tray protocol on X11.

• Last update: Tue Sep 2 14:29 UTC 2026
• Current version: 1.0.3

It was inspired by KDE’s classic kteatime, which I used in the early 2000s before moving from that desktop environment to Openbox and a GTK3-only setup.

• Timer off and timer on (with tooltip) icons on systray:

Dependencies

• libgtk-3-dev
• libx11-dev
• pkgconf (for Makefile)

On Debian-like systems:

sudo apt install pkgconf libgtk-3-dev libx11-dev

Build

make

Local run

./bin/gteatime

Install

Installation of the binary and the three needed icons can be done with:

make install

By default it will be installed in usr/local/bin, but that can be changed using, of course, the PREFIX standard. To install it in /usr/bin, use:

make PREFIX=/usr/ install

Icons can be copied into any theme. Under scalable/apps is a good place. For example: ~/.local/share/icons/my_icon_theme/scalable/apps/. There are only three icons:

• gteatime.svg -- program icon
• gteatime-on.svg -- systray running icon
• gteatime-off.svg -- systray idle icon

Although, the "on" and "off" icons are for the systray, and maybe it will be better to put them in the directory scalable/status.

Uninstall

make uninstall

But if the program was installed by modifying the PREFIX directory, it has to be specified as well, and in the same way, when invoking uninstall.

Desktop support

This program requires either a desktop component that implements the StatusNotifierItem watcher protocol, or an X11 tray manager that owns _NET_SYSTEM_TRAY_Sn (where n is the X11 screen number). KDE Plasma usually supports StatusNotifierItem directly. XFCE and other X11 panels usually support the fallback tray. GNOME on Wayland normally requires a tray or StatusNotifierItem extension.

No AppIndicator API was used.

Behavior

• Left click on the tray item opens the configuration window.
• Right click on the tray item opens the preset menu.
• Closing the window hides it and leaves the timer in the systray.
• The tray tooltip shows remaining time, or an idle message when no timer is running.
• A D-Bus desktop notification is shown when the timer completes.

Style notes

The code is written as C99-compliant.

Most editable program constants, including icon names, user-visible identity strings, and tray protocol names, are in include/defs.h.

Author

• J. A. Corbal jacorbal@gmail.com