wtf is cotray?

CoTray is a small Linux system tray application that keeps an eye on your GitHub Copilot CLI usage. It sits quietly in the tray of your desktop and checks your Copilot CLI status every five minutes, so you do not have to run a command to see how much of your AI credit plan you have used. The tray icon shows details such as your AI credit plan limits, current usage percentage, which model you are actively using (for example Gemini 3.1 Pro), and the reasoning effort level set for that model. Right-clicking the icon opens a settings panel where you can turn autostart on login on or off, upload a custom tray icon, and choose which of these metrics show up in the tray display. Because of how Wayland desktop environments like KDE Plasma and GNOME handle tray menus, the tray text appears as plain text rather than styled or colored text. This is a limitation of the desktop environment rather than a choice made by the developer. To use CoTray, you need Python 3 installed along with a few system libraries for tray icon support, and the GitHub Copilot CLI itself must already be installed, logged in, and reachable from your terminal. The project was built and tested on CachyOS, a version of Arch Linux, running Wayland, and includes a ready-made package file for Arch-based systems. Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora users can install the required system libraries with their package manager and run the application directly with Python. Settings are stored locally on your machine, and the project is released under the MIT license. The README notes this project was built entirely by an AI coding agent.