Xfce Notify Daemon

The Xfce Notify Daemon (or xfce4-notifyd) is a small program that implements the "server-side" portion of the Freedesktop desktop notifications specification. Applications that wish to pop up a notification bubble in a standard way can implicitly make use of xfce4-notifyd to do so by sending standard messages over D-Bus using the org.freedesktop.Notifications interface.

Apart from the notification server, a panel plugin is included which shows recent notifications in a dropdown menu in the Xfce Panel.

Dependencies

• gtk+ 3.22
• glib 2.68
• libxfce4util 4.12.0
• libxfce4ui 4.12.0
• xfconf 4.10
• libnotify 0.7
• libxfce4panel 4.12.0 (for the panel plugin)
• sqlite 3.34
• libcanberra 0.30 (optional; required for sound support)

Additionally, on X11, having a compositing manager running is recommended. This is necessary for features like transparency and animations.

Wayland support seems to work, but should be considered experimental, and may not work with all Wayland compositors. Wayland support additionally requires:

• gtk-layer-shell 0.7

Your Wayland compositor must support the layer-shell protocol.

Installation

The usual:

# If from a git checkout:
./autogen.sh
# Or from a release tarball:
./configure

make
make install

should work just fine. Pass --prefix=/path/to/wherever to install in a location other than the default /usr/local.

X11 and Wayland support will be autodetected, but you can pass --enable-x11, --enable-wayland, --disable-x11, and/or --disable-wayland to require and/or explicitly disable support for either.

In order for xfce4-notifyd to be started automatically, you must have a <servicedir> directive in your D-Bus session configuration file. If you install xfce4-notifyd to a standard prefix (like /usr), you shouldn't have to worry about this.

If you install xfce4-notifyd to a non-standard prefix, the D-Bus and systemd service and unit files will be installed to the non-standard prefix as well, in places where the respective daemons may not be able to find them. You can pass --with-dbus-service-dir= and --with-systemd-user-service-dir= to configure in order to set the appropriate directories. If you want configure to automatically figure out the correct places to put those files (which may be outside your installation prefix), you can pass auto as the value to those two command-line options.

Configuration

Run xfce4-notifyd-config to display the settings dialog.

The panel plugin has a separate properties dialog, which shows all configuration options for it.

Hidden Settings

There is currently only one hidden setting (all others are configurable via the settings dialog), which can be set using xfconf-query (on channel xfce4-notifyd):

• /compat/use-override-redirect-windows (boolean): this defaults to false. If your window manager displays notification windows in a strange way (gives it borders or a titlebar, doesn't allow it above fullscreen windows, etc.), you can try setting this to true. Be aware, though, that notifications may end up being displayed above your screen saver / screen locker, which you might consider an unacceptable security risk.

Theming

Xfce4-notifyd uses Gtk+'s standard theming system. For examples, check out the themes included with xfce4-notifyd. Custom themes can be placed in $HOME/.themes/$THEME_NAME/xfce4-notify-4.0, using a file called gtk.css. You can also override notification styles directly in a GTK3 theme using the #XfceNotifyWindow widget name.

If you have created a cool theme you can submit it by opening an issue on Xfce GitLab. For themes shipped with xfce4-notifyd, all parts are required to be redistributable under the terms of a license compatible with GPLv2.