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SiftSift

Auto-launch Behavior

Automatic, silent, best-effort

Section titled “Automatic, silent, best-effort”

When sift-tray is installed next to sift or available on PATH, sift watch start and sift watch resume try to launch it automatically.

This is deliberately silent and best-effort:

  • Watch still succeeds if the tray isn’t installed;
  • a headless environment (no display) doesn’t cause a failure;
  • only one tray instance ever runs at a time, via a singleton lock.

Every failure mode here — not installed, no display server, already running, spawn error — is swallowed on purpose. watch start/resume must never fail, warn, or block on whether a tray icon could be shown.

Explicit launch

Section titled “Explicit launch”
Terminal window
sift watch tray

Launches sift-tray on its own, without starting or resuming a watch — and unlike the automatic path above, this reports exactly what happened:

  • Started sift-tray. — spawned, and confirmed it acquired its singleton lock.
  • sift-tray is already running. — nothing was spawned.
  • an error if sift-tray isn’t installed, with instructions.
  • an error if it was spawned but never came up within a couple of seconds — worth checking its log for details in that case.
Section titled “Related”