While sometimes tray icons appear in a single square block of items, most of times tray icons are shown separately. It wouldn't be as bad if icons would appear in a single rectangle with (VxH) 2xN icons, not in two or more separated groups of 4 items, like below:


Could you make it show the icons group attached one to each other?

No, for lots of reasons, they have to be separated into individual 'dock items'.

How may system tray icons are grouped into a single dock item depends on the dock's icon size: the idea is that each tray icon in a group, when the dock is not being magnified, is exactly 16x16 pixels (i.e.; original size). For instance, for a dock with an icon size of 48x48 pixels, each dock item will fit 3x3 (48/16) tray icons.

This said, if you add so many items to the dock that it doesn't fit on the screen at the selected icon size, the dock's icon size is automatically reduced until it fits. This also means less tray icons will fit into each dock item, e.g.; if the icon size is automatically reduced to 47x47, even though this is only one pixel less than 48x48, each dock item will now only be able to hold 2x2 (INT(47/16))tray icons (i.e.; 4 tray icons per dock item).

So if I well understood, tray icons are treated as same as any other dock item, just that they're put together to fit a single icon size, right?

Well, if you can't do anything I'll get used to it.

Yes, but keep in mind you can always un-group them in Preferences. In that case, each single tray icon uses a single dock item.

The problem with this is twofold: first the tray items use a lot more space in a dock (space that is at a premium in the free version of Nexus since you can only have one dock), second, the tray icons will look very blurred, as they are 16x16 icons being magnified to 48x48 and above.

These issues are solved by Nexus Ultimate and Xtreme: since both allow you to have multiple docks and sub-docks, you can dedicate a separate dock, or a sub-dock if you prefer, to an un-grouped system tray. In v11.5 you can also customize the tray icons, even the individual frames of animated ones, so they display a high resolution image of your choice instead.