Want to integrate notifications into your Desktop Environment-less Linux set-up? Look no further!

What is Notificatcher

Notificatcher is a very simple program that interfaces with dbus to read Freedesktop notifications and output them in whatever format you specify. Whether you want to simply dump them to a file, or display them in a status bar or use a third-party program to make them pop up on screen is entirely up to you. Notificatcher is built to do a single task, and to do it well.

But why?

It all started when I switched to using Nimdow as my Window Manager. Previously I've been using i3 and dunst to display notifications, but I was never really happy with how my notifications appeared with dunst, and I could never remember the shortcut to read notifications after they were gone. Nimdow, similarily to dwm and some other light-weight window managers have a status bar that supports reading the name of the root window and displaying it as a way of being able to add custom information to the bar. Nimdow also supports ANSI colours for this bar, so it's easy to customise it with some proper flare. While writing my status bar script I figured it could be cool if it could simply flash any recent notification instead of showing system data. This would mean that I no longer had any annoying pop ups to deal with from dunst, and it would still be able to grab my attention by blinking. But there was one problem, by simply using bash I couldn't find any obvious way of getting notifications. There simply didn't exist an easy and clean solution for just getting notifications as text. And thus Notificatcher was born! In my set-up I have it set to dump all notifications to a file, then my status bar bash script will see if the notifications file is empty, and if not it will flash the last line of the file along with a count of notifications if there are more than one. I then have two simple ZSH aliases to clear and read notifications, the latter simply a command to run less -r with the notifications file before clearing it with : > /tmp/notifications.

Sounds cool, how do I use it?

Easiest way to figure it out is by checking out the help message:

Notificatcher 0.2.0

Freedesktop notifications interface. When run without arguments it will simply
output all notifications to the terminal one notification per line. If supplied
with arguments it can also send signals indicating that a notification was
closed, or if an action was performed on the notification. This program will
not do anything in particular with the CloseNotification message.

Usage:
  notificatcher [options] [<format>]
  notificatcher send <id> (close <reason> | action <action_key>)

Options:
  -h --help          Show this screen.
  -v --version       Show the version
  -f --file <file>   File to output messages to (errors will still go to stderr)

The format that can be supplied is a fairly simple replacement format for how
to output the notifications. It will perform these replacements:
{appName} -> The name of the app
{replacesId} -> ID of the notification this notification replaces
{appIcon} -> The name of the icon to use
{summary} -> The summary of the notification
{body} -> The body text of the notification, be warned that this can contain
  newlines so should be somehow wrapped if you want to split the output into
  individual notifications.
{expireTimeout} -> Expiry timeout
{assignedId} -> The ID assigned to this notification
{actions} -> The list of actions, separated by commas
{hints:<hint name>} -> A named hint from the table of hints, after the hint
  name you can also supply a list of string separated by colons which will be
  selected by the hint as an integer, e.g. {hints:urgency:low:normal:critical}.
{time:<format>} -> The time of the notification as recorded upon receival,
  format is a string to format by, as specified in the Nim times module.

If no format is specified, this format is used:
  {appName}: {summary} ({hints:urgency:low:normal:critical})