notify

Scriptable desktop notifications for Linux

notify is a simple executable meant to do one thing and do it well - give users a way to notify end users when something important occurs on their system. This isn't a replacement for notifications that an application handles natively, but instead aims to be a better alternative to notify-send

Goals

• Working across multiple distros
• Working on multiple window managers (Gnome and KDE at least)
• Working on headless systems
• Offering means for user interaction with the notification (such as buttons, signals, etc.)
• Ability to specify a timeout (in minutes) that the notification expires after
• Fully scriptable
• Attempt to not be locked in to a single platform

What it looks like

Notifications are presented normally based on what your window manager provides. Here are a couple of instances for what they look like when launched with the following commands:

./notify -t 2 -o First -v 1 -o Second -v 2 -o "Third Option" -v 3 "Notify <WM> Example" "A simple example of a notification in <WM>"

Gnome

KDE

Usage

notify [options] <TITLE> <DESCRIPTION>

Options:
    --option|-o     An option, up to 3 are allowed. Options are displayed in
                    the notification buttons.
    --value|-v      A value, up to 3 are allowed. Values are printed when a
                    notification option is selected.
    --timeout|-t    Notification lifetime, in minutes.
    --icon|-i       The desired icon name to be displayed in the notification.

Building

Native

When you are building natively on your distro of choice, you will need to ensure that you have the development requirements from above installed on your system. Once that is all said and done, you should be able to build notify by simply running make from your terminal.

It is worth noting that make on its own will run through everything in the build process, including linting and testing, as well as outputting the executable at the end. You may select individual build targets as well.

Containerized

If you could like to develop and compile notify in a docker container, you are more than welcome to do so. We have set up multiple build environments (or will, given time) so you can build for your distribution of choice. See containers/build/ for the currently-available list of container files.

NOTE: All container commands are meant to be run from the top-level directory of notify.

Building within a container file is done like so:
./bin/oci-make

This will take charge of determining your container runtime environment, checking if you already have a build container image (or building it, if needed), and running make within the container. For more information, see the Development Documentation.

Development Requirements

Below is a list of packages required for their various distributions to build and test notify. If your distribution isn't listed, feel free to add it!

If you are interested in reading further information on development practices and how to contribute, see the Development Documentation.

Fedora

dnf/yum

bash
clang
findutils
gmock-devel
gtest-devel
gtk3-devel
jq
lcov
libnotify-devel
llvm
make
python3-pip

pip3

compiledb

For quick setup, run bin/configure (requires sudo access, currently only for Fedora systems).

Ubuntu

apt-get

bash
build-essential
clang
clang-tools
findutils
gtk+-3-dev
jq
lcov
libgmock-dev
libgtest-dev
libnotify-dev
llvm
pkg-config
python3-pip

pip3

compiledb

Other distros

FIXME: No instructions yet.

License

Apache 2