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XNotify

demo

XNotify displays a notification on the screen. XNotify receives a notification specification in stdin and shows a notification for the user on the screen.

XNotify comes with the following features:

  • XNotify receives notifications from stdin. You can use a fifo to echo notifications on the fly like echo Hello World > /path/to/xnotify.fifo
  • XNotify queues notifications and displays them one above the other.
  • Image support, just prefix the notification string with IMG:/path/to/the/file.png and a tab.
  • Multiple monitor support. You can set the monitor with the -m option.
  • Support for fallback fonts (you can set more than one fonts, that will be tried in order).
  • X resources support (you don't need to recompile Xnotify for configuring it).

Options

XNotify understands the following command-line options:

  • -b button: Specify the action button.
  • -g gravity: Specify the screen corner/border to place notifications at.
  • -h height: Specify the maximum height of a notification popup.
  • -m monitor: Specify the monitor to place notifications at.
  • -o: Only one notification at a time.
  • -r: Also read notifications from root window name (in addition to read from standard input).
  • -s seconds: Specify the time in seconds notifications are visible.
  • -w: Let the window manager control notification popups.

Customization

XNotify can be customized by setting the following X resources.

  • alignment: Text alignment (left, center, or right).
  • background: Background color.
  • borderColor: Border color.
  • borderWidth: Border width in pixels.
  • faceName: Font.
  • foreground: Text color.
  • gap: Gap between notifications, in pixels.
  • gravity: Screen corner/border to place notifications at.
  • leading: Space between lines.
  • maxHeight: Maximum notification height.
  • opacity: Notification opacity from 0.0 to 1.0.
  • shrink: Whether to shrink notifications to its content size.
  • padding: Margin around the content.
  • wrap: Whether to wrap long lines.

Installation

Run make all to build, and make install to install the binary and the manual into ${PREFIX} (/usr/local).

Usage

XNotify receives as input one line per notification. Each line is made out of a notification title and a notification body separated by any number of tabs. Lines without a title are ignored.

The following is an example of how to run XNotify

$ xnotify -m 10 -G NE -g -10+10 -s 15

This line means: read notifications from stdin, display the notifications on the north east (-G NE) of the monitor 0 (-m 0), that is, on the upper right corner of the first monitor. The notifications should be placed 10 pixels to the left and 10 pixels down (thus creating a 10 pixel gap with the upper right corner). Each notification stay alive for 15 seconds.

To create a named pipe for XNotify, you can place the following in the beginning of your ~/.xinitrc. This will create a named pipe unique to your current X display in your home directory at ~/.cache. Then, it will open xnotify in the background, reading from this named pipe.

XNOTIFY_FIFO="$HOME/.cache/xnotify$DISPLAY.fifo"
export XNOTIFY_FIFO
rm -f $XNOTIFY_FIFO
mkfifo $XNOTIFY_FIFO
xnotify 0<>$XNOTIFY_FIFO

Note that the first two lines (the line setting the environment variable and the line exporting it) should be at the beginning of your ~/.xinitrc, so other programs you invoke are aware of this variable.

To create a notification with a image, input to XNotify a line beginning with IMG:/path/to/file.png followed by a tab. For example:

$ printf 'IMG:/path/to/file.png\tThis is a notification\n' > $XNOTIFY_FIFO

To read dbus notifications from stdin, you'll need tiramisu. Then add the following line to your .xinitrc, after the line calling xnotify.

$ tiramisu -o "$(printf '#summary\t#body\n')" > $XNOTIFY_FIFO &

To use a different size other than the default for the notifications, run xnotify with the -g option set to the notification size in WIDTHxHEIGHT. For example:

$ xnotify -g 300x80

The argument for the -g option has the form [WIDTHxHEIGHT][{+-}XPOS{+-}YPOS]. Parts between square brackets are optional. {+-} means to chose either + or -.

License

The code and manual are under the MIT/X license. See ./LICENSE for more information.

Epilogue

Read the manual.