Albin,

I couldn't find any existing program to get put text into the gnome
panel, so I eventually built something:

https://gitorious.org/jasonwoof/now-playing-d

It just reads stdin, and displays the most recent full line in your
notification area.

I do something like this:

	mkfifo ~/tmp/systray-text
	while true; do cat ~/tmp/systray-text; done | ~/bin/now-playing-d

then I can:

	echo "$(notmuch count tag:unread) unread" > ~/tmp/systray-text


I'm still using gnomeConfig and set xmonad as the gnome window
manager. Recently I got gnome not to start gname-panel (because
gnome-panel broke) and I've been running xmobar instead. Just
wanted to say that you don't have to run gnome-panel.

You can disable gnome-panel with gconf-editor, and say that your
panel command is /bin/true or something.

    -- Jason