NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The options are as follows:

-G gravity

Specify the gravity, that is, where in the screen to display xnotify. gravity can be "NE" for NorthEastGravity (display on the top right corner of the screen); "SE" for SouthEastGravity (display on the bottom right corner of the screen); "C" for CenterGravity (display on the center of the screen); etc.

-b button

Specifies a number between 1 and 5 to be the mouse action button. When clicking over a notification with the action button, the notification will close, and xnotify will output to its stdout the value of the notification's CMD: option.

-g geometry

Specifies the geometry in the form [<WIDTH>x<HEIGHT>][{-+}<XOFFSET>{-+}<YOFFSET>]. Replace <WIDTH> by the desired width, <HEIGHT> by the desired minimum height, and so on. The height is the minimum height of a notification; a notification that contains a body or an image can get bigger than this minimum height. A value of 0 sets a field to the default value. So, for example, -g 0x80+0+0 set the minimum height to 80 pixels while maintaining other values to the default. <XOFFSET> and <YOFFSET> can be preceded by either a minus or a plus (meaning negative or positive values). Fields in square brackets are optional. So, for example, -g 0x80 is the same as -g 0x80+0+0; and -g -10+10 is the same as -g 0x0-10+10.

-m monitor

Makes xnotify be displayed on the specified monitor. Monitor numbers start from 0. Without this option, xnotify is displayed on the first monitor (that is, the monitor 0).

-o

With this option, only one notification should exist at a time. So, when a new notification appears, the other ones are removed.

-s seconds

Specify the time, in seconds, for a notification to be displayed before it is removed from screen. Without this option, the default of 10 seconds is used.

Each line read from stdin specify a notification and has the following format:

ITEM := [NAME:VALUE TABS] TITLE [TABS BODY] NEWLINE
    

That means that each line is composed by an optional set of name-value pairs separated by colon (:) followed by tabs, then the title text of the notification, then a optional body text of the notification preceded by tabs, then a newline. Brackets group optional elements. Empty lines are ignored.

The following names are currently accepted for the NAME:VALUE pairs:

IMG:

Specify the path of a image to be displayed on the notification.

TAG:

Specify a string to be the notification's tag. When a notification with a given tag spawns, all other notifications with the same tag disappears.

CMD:

Specify a string to be output when clicking on the notification with the action mouse button.

BG:

Specify the color of the notification background.

FG:

Specify the color of the notification text (i.e., its foreground).

BRD:

Specify the color of the notification border.

SEC:

Specify the time, in seconds, that the notification should stay visible. If set to zero, the notification will stay visible until being clicked.

Clicking on a notification removes it from the screen.

ENVIRONMENT

DISPLAY

The display to start xnotify on.

RESOURCES

xnotify.title.font

The fonts to draw the notification title text. More than one font can be specified, separated by comma (,). If more than one font is specified, the first font with a given glyph is used to display that glyph on the screen.

xnotify.body.font

The fonts to draw the notification body text.

xnotify.background

The color of the notification background.

xnotify.foreground

The color of the notification text.

xnotify.border

The color of the border around a notification.

xnotify.geometry

The geometry in the form [<WIDTH>x<HEIGHT>][{+-}<XOFFSET>{+-}<YOFFSET>]. See the description of the option -g for more information.

xnotify.gravity

Where in the screen to display notifications. See the description of the option -G for more information.

xnotify.borderWidth

The size in pixels of the border around a notification.

xnotify.gap

The gap between notifications.

xnotify.imageWidth

The size of the image attached to the notification.

xnotify.leading

The space between the title text and the body text.

xnotify.padding

The space around the content inside the notification popup window.

xnotify.shrink

If set to "true", the image width will shrink to its content size.

xnotify.alignment

If set to "left", "center", or "right", text is aligned to the left, center, or right of the popup window, respectively. By default, notification text is aligned to the left of the notification popup window.

SIGNALS

SIGUSR1

Close all notifications.

SIGUSR2

Print the CMD of the first notification and then close all notifications.

SIGSTOP

Stop xnotify. When this signal is sent, all new notifications are accumuled until xnotify receive a SIGCONT signal. This signal is useful to be sent when a window is fullscreen, so xnotify will not annoy with notifications on top of the fullscreen window. A SIGUSR1 signal must be sent before a SIGSTOP in order to close all notifications before stop.

SIGCONT

Display all accumulated notifications and continue xnotify after being stop with SIGSTOP.

EXAMPLES

$ 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, the following lines can be placed on ~/.xinitrc. This will create a named pipe unique to the current X display in the 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 &
    

Then a notification can be created by echoing into the named pipe:

$ echo Hello World > $XNOTIFY_FIFO
    

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
    

xnotify does not read notifications from dbus. For xnotify to read dbus notifications, its stdin must be fed with the output of tiramisu(1) parsed by jq(1). The following line makes tiramisu(1) send dbus notifications to xnotify. This line can be added to ~/.xinitrc after the line calling xnotify.

tiramisu -j | jq --raw-output --unbuffered '.summary + "\t" + .body' > $XNOTIFY_FIFO &
    

SEE ALSO