There are a few great notification daemons around. Unfortunately, they all use their own configuration language. If you already use eww for your widgets, wouldn't it be great if you could just use it for your notifications as well?
The Eww Notification Daemon, or End for short, allows you to do exactly that. It leverages eww's literal widget to dynamically display
libnotify notifications. You define the eww widgets that are used to display a notification and the eww window that they will appear in.
You can either build the project yourself or use one of the prebuilt binaries under Releases.
I recommend using Stack to avoid dependency problems. To install Stack, just run
curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | shor check out docs.haskellstack.org if you don't like curl | sh.
Then run the following commands to build End.
git clone https://github.com/lucalabs-de/end
cd end
stack installThis will install the executable under ~/.local/bin.
You can also use Cabal. The required tools can be installed by GHCup. To build End, run the following commands.
git clone https://github.com/lucalabs-de/end
cd end
cabal buildYou will find the executable under
dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-<GHC version>/EwwNotificationDaemon-<End version>/x/end/build/end
To start the notification daemon, simply run the executable. You'll probably want to put something like
end &in your WM's init file.
You need to provide an eww window that End will use to show notifications. For this to work, the window is required
to contain the widget (literal :content end-notifications), where end-notifications is an eww variable that needs to be defined using (defvar end-notifications "").
The following commands are supported.
endStarts the notification daemon.
end stopStops the notification daemon.
end close <id>Closes the notification with the given ID. Useful for notifications that don't time out.
end action <id> <key>Invoke the action with identifier <key> for the notification with the given ID.
End checks $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/end (most likely ~/.config/end) for a config.toml, which is structured as follows.
[config]
### Optional. Name of the widget used for general notifications. If this is not supplied, End
### will fall back to a default widget (which is really ugly, so you'll want to set this ^^).
eww-default-notification-key = ""
### Optional. Name of the eww window that the notifications are rendered in. If this is set,
### End will manage the window for you. If not, you will have to open/close it yourself.
eww-window = ""
### Optional. The maximal number of notifications that are shown at a time. When the current number
### of visible notifications exceeds this value, the notification with the soonest timeout will be
### dropped. If none of the notifications have a timeout, the oldest will be dropped.
###
### A value of 0 means that notifications will never get dropped.
max-notifications = 0
### Optional. Defines whether multiple notifications should be displayed above each other (v) or
### next to each other (h).
notification-orientation = "v"
### Optional. Defines the timeouts for different types of notifications in seconds. A value
### of 0 means that the notification will never timeout
timeout.urgency.low = 5
timeout.urgency.normal = 10
timeout.urgency.critical = 0We've seen that you can define your own notification widgets.
The notification data is supplied to the widget by the parameter notification, which is a JSON object of the following form
{
id: <notification id>
application: <Application Name>
icon: <Notification Icon>
summary: <Summary>
body: <Body>
hints: {
"<hint key>": <hint value>,
...
},
actions: [
{
key: <action identifier>
name: <action string>
}
]
}
As such, a general notification widget looks as follows.
(defwidget end-notification
[notification]
... your content ...)
The parameters correspond to the libnotify notification components.
The Notification Specification defines two different ways of attaching images to notifications. Applications may either supply a file path (using the image-path hint) to an image or the binary image data itself (using the image-data hint). Since eww does not have any way of parsing binary data, end converts the image for you and exposes a file path to the resulting image. The hints will thus never contain the image-data key, and if the notification contains an image the image-path hint will be set.
You can find a basic complete example configuration in the example folder.