Is there any better-looking OSD than xosd?

Question

Hi there!
I recently got into xosd, but find it rather ugly. So I'm wondering if there's any other OSD implementation that looks a little less blocky. I've heard of notify-osd, but I'd rather do without having a daemon running all the time.
So is there any viable alternatives?
Best wishes,
Rufus

Answer 1

I think you cannot go without a deamon for notifications. You could use the xosd library and program your own look and feel of notifications. In example, I did my notification system like this:
(import chicken scheme extras)
(use posix xosd)
(define (xosd-set-pcm osd)
(xosd:set-align osd 'left)
(xosd:set-bar-length osd 40)
(xosd:set-pos osd 'bottom)
(xosd:set-vertical-offset osd 1)
(xosd:set-horizontal-offset osd 180)
(xosd:set-colour osd "#B3B3B3")
(xosd:set-timeout osd 2))
(define (xosd-set-msg osd)
(xosd:set-align osd 'center)
(xosd:set-pos osd 'bottom)
(xosd:set-font osd "sans-8")
; *-bitstream vera sans-medium-r-normal-*-11-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
(xosd:set-colour osd "#B3B3B3")
(xosd:set-vertical-offset osd 2)
(xosd:set-horizontal-offset osd -3)
(xosd:set-timeout osd 10))
(define (sighandler ignore)
(delete-file "/tmp/.ipcfifo")
(exit 0))
(define (ipc-server)
(define mypipe "/tmp/.ipcfifo")
(define amixercheck "amixer sget PCM | grep \"Left: Playback\" | grep -o \"\\[[0-9]*%\\]\" | tr '[%]' ' ' | tr -d \"[:blank:]\"")
(when (file-exists? mypipe)
(delete-file mypipe))
(create-fifo mypipe)
(set-signal-handler! signal/term sighandler)
(let ((osd-pcm (xosd:create 1)) (osd-msg (xosd:create 1)))
(xosd-set-pcm osd-pcm)
(xosd-set-msg osd-msg)
(let loop ()
(let ((pipedata (call-with-input-file mypipe read-line))); this blocks - sleep won't block
(cond ((string=? pipedata "checkpcm")
(let ((pcmlvl (call-with-input-pipe amixercheck read)))
(xosd:display osd-pcm 0 pcmlvl)))
(else (xosd:display osd-msg 0 pipedata))))
(loop))))
(process-fork ipc-server)
With using that I have:
http://ompldr.org/vOWtidQ/bar.png
http://ompldr.org/vOWtidg/msgr.png