notify-send.sh

notify-send.sh is a replacement solution for notify-send (from libnotify) with many extra features you might find useful.

This is a fork of bkw777's fork of vlevit's original script! The main purpose of my fork is to address portability but I added a lot of other features too:

• I ensured that notify-send.sh and the other child services are now written in nothing but pure POSIX compliant shell. Which includes ksh, csh, bash, ash, dash, fish and more shells.
• notify-action.sh is now more user friendly.
• Added notify-exec.sh to serve as an action status notifier.
• notify-send.sh can now report information about the notification server.
• I made a great deal of effort to ensure this complies with standard.

The reason I chose bkw777's fork as my base, was the effort they put in to remove the external tools, here-docs, make notify-send more compliant with the notification client standards, and other useful features.

The dependencies are GNU's coreutils, gdbus (shipped with glib2), and a any POSIX compliant shell as a runtime provider.

In Ubuntu you can ensure all dependencies are installed with the following command (this also prevents automatic install state clobbering):

if ! dpkg -S "$(type -p gdbus)"; then sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-bin; fi;

forewarning: The TUI has changed, from master. The original TUI wasn't POSIX compliant. It sought to emulate and replace notify-send, which used a non-POSIX-compliant TUI. That has been discarded in favor of POSIX adherence: using -h for help over -?; --hint's partner has been changed to -H. Linux is POSIX compliant, and I would argue any OS derived from it should at least maintain consistency within that specification. It provides a unified interface for users that removes complications when moving between alternative distributions.

In the future, I may inquire about introducing these features upstream within notify-send. I don't want to introduce any extra complexity into the Linux notification ecosystem by releasing this toolkit. Think of this as a proof of concept project.

Examples

If we want to notify a user of a new email we can run something like the following:

notify-send.sh \
	--icon=mail-unread \
	--app-name=mail \
	--hint=string:sound-name:message-new-email \
	"Subject" "Message";

Just want to say something?

notify-send.sh "Hello World!" "carpe diem! lorem ipsum, tu amo.";

Lifetime Management

Let's say you want to update the body of a notification, you can do that!

# To replace or close existing message first we should know its id. To
# get id we have to run notify-send.sh with `--print-id`.
notify-send.sh --print-id "Subject" "Message"
# Prints: 10

# Now we can update this notification using `--replace` option.
notify-send.sh --replace=10 "New Subject" "New Message"

# Now we may want to close the notification if we didn't set an appropriate
# timeout.
notify-send.sh --close=10

Maybe you need to update the same notification several times. The --replace-file parameter is your best friend.

# Every time this runs, it increases the volume by 5% and displays the new volume.
notify-send.sh \
	--replace-file=/tmp/volumenotification \
	"Increase Volume" "$(amixer sset Master 5%+ | awk '/[0-9]+%/ {print $2,$5}')"

User Action Triggers

Sometimes you'll need to have users interact with a notification to trigger an action. There are three different types of action triggers you can use to achieve your goals.

# The following will create a notification with a default action.
# Default actions are usually invoked when the notification area is clicked.
# NOTE: No two notification servers are the same and some implement this
#       feature differently. Know your target operating system and server.
notify-send.sh \
	-d "notify-send.sh 'Default Action' 'I was triggered as a default action!'" \
	"Click Me!" "Please 🥺";

# This will make a button using the quoted text before the colon.
# Multiple buttons can be used on the same notification.
notify-send.sh \
	-o "Click Me!":"notify-send.sh 'Wow <3' 'Click harder senpai!'" \
	"I have a button UwU" "You should press it...";

# Finally, this runs a command when the notification closes regardless of
# whether or not any other action was executed.
notify-send.sh \
	-l "notify-send.sh '(╬ ಠ益ಠ)' 'ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)'" \
	"I'm angy." "No touchy!";

Diagnostics / Server Information

Find information about your notification server by using the --server-info and --list-capabilities options.

# On my machine I'm running Xfce as my session manager.
notify-send.sh --server-info;
# Name:           'Xfce Notify Daemon'
# Vendor:         'Xfce'
# Server Version: '0.4.2'
# Spec. Version:  '1.2'

# You get the gist. Right?
notify-send.sh --list-compatabilies;
# Status of server capabilities:
# "actions"         - SUPPORTED
# "action-icons"    - UNSUPPORTED
# "body"            - SUPPORTED
# "body-hyperlinks" - SUPPORTED
# "body-images"     - UNSUPPORTED
# "body-markup"     - SUPPORTED
# "icon-frames"     - STATIC
# "persistence"     - UNSUPPORTED
# "sound"           - UNSUPPORTED