Dunst - a dmenu-ish notification daemon

Hello everybody,
The information in this post is very out of date. Have a look at the homepage for a more up to date introduction.
I've spend the last day creating a simple notification-daemon. It uses the drawing code from dmenu and because of that looks a lot like it.
It can listen to notifications from libnotify or be used standalone to display messages (maybe useful in some scripts).
Originally it was suppost to be a patch for dwm and I just used the drawing code from dmenu to prevent constant restarting of dwm to test it.
But in the end i figured it would be more usefull as a standalone application.
homepage
The source is available at http://github.com/knopwob/dunst
If you're interested in this kind of notification-daemon make sure you also check out twmn .
Here are a few screenshots of dunst at work:
critic, suggestions, and so on is welcome, of course.
Last edited by knopwob (2012-08-23 19:18:00)

you've got good points here.
ninian wrote:
Aha ... you're well ahead of me there! I completely appreciate your priorities. But here are my thoughts ...
I think the two functions of Dunst need to be considered almost separately:
1) The daemon function, which for compatibility should follow the Desktop Notifications Specification as far as the Dmenu-ish programming allows (eg, probably no icons!). This would allow Dunst to be used as a lightweight drop-in replacement for notification-daemon, xfce4-notifyd, etc. In particular, notify-send should produce similar notification messages with Dunst as can be achieved with the other notification daemons (including timeout options, eg critical messages remain on screen, but others timeout with the normal defaults or whatever is specified with the -to option).
complying to specifications is always a good thing I think, we are on the same page concerning urgency-levels and timeouts. This will be implemented in the near future.
About the issue with notify-send's name being displayed. It don't like the idea of hardcoding an exception for one application. As far as I know, no other notification daemon displays the name of the Application, which sended the message. But actually I like it. So how about making it optional. I've got something like this in mind:
dunst -format "%a: %s -- %b" <-- This would be the current state
%a -> application name
%s -> summary
%b -> message body.
This way, if you don't want the application name displayed, you could change the option to something like this:
dunst -format "%s: %b"
This way only the summary and the body of the message will be displayed. As it is (as far as I know) the state with the other notification-daemons around.
ninian wrote:Having different colours for different calling applications wouldn't be of much use to me, because it's the category of message which is usually more important than the application name itself. For example, a reminders program can issue standard or urgent reminders. I might like the ordinary ones in blue, but the urgent ones in red.
Yes I agree with you that there should be a visual clue for the urgency-level of a message. I guess an additional option for the color of urgend messages would be appropriate.
At this point I think I should also think about adding a config file, because the commandline could grow fairly large if you use all the available options.
ninian wrote:
2) The direct messaging function, using -msg, can be formatted much more flexibly as it doesn't need to conform to the standard above. But as long as it produces similar results which "fit in" with the notifications produced by the Dunst daemon, I'd be happy, no matter the bells and whistles available for formatting the message.
At the moment I use dzen2 for home-made notifications, categorized by different colours and timeouts into: errors (with or without an alarm bell), warnings, information messages, standard messages. Other formal notifications (from Thunderbird, Osmo, etc) are handled by xfce4-notifyd. What I'd love is just to use Dunst for everything, probably via notify-send.
I guess this is where you found the issue about multiple messages being displayed on top of each other? As soon as I found a way to make dunst notice, that there's already a message displayed by another instance of dunst and make it act accordingly (either add the message to the existing message or add another message next to it) this should be possible.
Last edited by knopwob (2011-09-13 17:00:03)

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schalox wrote:
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since declare opens a subshell this wont work either. too bad, it looks much cleaner
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#!/bin/bash
# teiler - A script to share (german word: teilen) screenshots/casts for tiling WMs - Pun intended
# (c) Rasmus Steinke <rasi at xssn dot at>
# Additional Ideas, testing and some code by Zeltak <zeltak at gmail dot com>
# Requirements:
# xclip, fb-client, pinta, dzen2, dmenu, ffmpeg, scrot, bc, some notification daemon
#changelog
#v0.8
#Put notify-send into its own function, Made delay being calculated from counter value.
#v0.7
#Massive Code Cleanup
#v0.6
#Countdown script stolen from Google and integrated.
#v0.5
#added clip uploading
#v0.4
#added screencast function
#v0.3
#added 1.notifications 2.unique names for each type (for quick launch) 3.better photo editor (pinta) 4.dmenu title
############### Configuration options ##############################
IMG_PATH=/home/carnager/Pictures/Screenshots/
FILEMASK=%Y-%m-%d-@%H-%M-%S-scrot.png
UL=fb
EDIT=pinta
RES=1920x1080 #set your screen resolution
TIME=3000 #How long will notifications be visible? (in miliseconds)
COUNTER1=3 #Seconds to count for delay (Use $COUNTD variable)
COUNTER2=6 #Seconds to count for delay (Use $COUNTD2 variable)
#DMENU/DZEN2 CONFIGURATION
FONT="Envy Code R-9"
NF="#7c7c72"
NB="#1a1a1a"
SF="#FFFFFF"
SB="#33B5E5"
DZEN2_W=100 #Width of dzen2
DZEN2_X=850 #X Padding
################## Configuration End ##############################
# Needed for the countdown
# Based on some script by Marco Fontani - MFONTANI at cpan dot org
set -bm
COLOR='#7c7c72'
function countdown () {
seq 1 ${1:-10} | tac | \
perl -ne'BEGIN{$|++;$msg=shift}$m=int($_/60);$s=int($_-$m*60);printf("$m:%02d -- $msg\n",$s);sleep 1;' \
"${2:-ready...}"
# Outsource the notfiy-send to its own function to clean up the mess below a bit ;)
function notify() {
notify-send -u low --hint=int:transient:1 -t ${1} "Scrot" "${2}"
####Some Variables to clean up the code a bit
COUNTD="countdown $COUNTER1 GO | dzen2 -fn \"$FONT\" -fg \"$NF\" -ta c -w \"$DZEN2_W\" -bg \"$NB\" -x \"$DZEN2_X\""
COUNTD2="countdown $COUNTER2 GO | dzen2 -fn \"$FONT\" -fg \"$NF\" -ta c -w \"$DZEN2_W\" -bg \"$NB\" -x \"$DZEN2_X\""
XCLIP="(xclip -o;echo) | xclip -selection clipboard"
cd $IMG_PATH
#!/bin/bash
MENU="1. Quick Fullscreen
2. Select Area
3. Fullscreen Shot and Edit
4. Selection and Edit
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d. Delayed Fullscreen and Upload
e. Fullscreen and Edit and Upload
s. Selection and Upload
p. Selection and Edit and Upload
x. Upload Clipboard Content
c. Start Recording a Videocast
k. Stop Recording a Videocast
CHOICE="$(echo "$MENU" | dmenu -o 0.8 -l 20 -fn 'Envy Code R-10' -nf '#999' -nb '#000' -sf '#eee' -sb '#0077bb' -p "Make Your Wish:")"
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"1. Quick Fullscreen")
scrot -d 1 "$FILEMASK" && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot saved"
"2. Selection")
eval $COUNTD & scrot -d $(echo $COUNTER1+1 | bc) "$FILEMASK" && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot saved"
"3. Fullscreen Shot and Edit")
scrot -d 1 "$FILEMASK" -e "$EDIT \$f" && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot edited and saved"
"4. Selection and Edit")
scrot -s "$FILEMASK" -e "$EDIT \$f" && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot edited and saved"
"f. Fullscreen and Upload")
scrot -d 1 "$FILEMASK" -e "$UL \$f" && eval $XCLIP && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot uploaded"
"d. Delayed Fullscreen and Upload")
eval $COUNTD & scrot -d $(echo $COUNTER1+1 | bc) "$FILEMASK" -e "$UL \$f && rm -f \$f" && eval $XCLIP && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot uploaded"
"e. Fullscreen and Edit and Upload")
scrot -d 1 "$FILEMASK" -e "$EDIT \$f && $UL \$f && rm -f \$f" && eval $XCLIP && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot uploaded"
"s. Selection and Upload")
scrot -s "$FILEMASK" -e "$UL \$f && rm -f \$f" && eval $XCLIP && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot uploaded"
"p. Selection and Edit and Upload")
scrot -s "$FILEMASK" -e "$EDIT \$f && $UL \$f && rm -f \$f" && eval $XCLIP && notify ${TIME} "Screenshot uploaded"
"x. Upload Clipboard Content")
eval $COUNTD2 & sleep $(echo $COUNTER2+1 | bc) && xclip -o | fb && eval $XCLIP && notify ${TIME} "Clipboard uploaded"
"c. Start Recording a Videocast")
ffmpeg -r 25 -f x11grab -s $RES -i $DISPLAY+0,0 -vcodec libx264 temp_cast.mkv && notify ${TIME} "Screencast started"
"k. Stop Recording a Videocast")
kill $(pgrep -f x11grab) && sleep 3 && $UL temp_cast.mkv && rm -f temp_cast.mkv && eval $XCLIP && notify ${TIME} "Screencast uploaded"
notify-send "No Selection Made"
esac
and here is how it looks:

Dunst - a dmenu-ish notification daemon

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