A minimal and daemonless notification program for X

2022.04.02

Features

Very lightweight. ~250 lines of C.
Few dependencies, usually pre-installed: Xlib, libXft and libXrandr.
Multiple notifications are queued using a lock file. This avoids the trouble of having a daemon (e.g D-Bus) constantly running in the background.
Non-blocking behavior, so that it can be used inside scripts easily.
Configuration is done by editing config.h and recompiling the source code, in a similar fashion to suckless utilities. No knowledge of C is required to edit the file. Compilation takes around 1 second.
Clicking on the notification window will make it disappear.

nfy(1) works by piping text into it. Text cannot be passed as argument:

$ echo 'hello world' | nfy
$ nfy < foo.txt

If stdin is empty, it exits with an error:

$ nfy
nfy: stdin is empty

nfy

First make sure all settings in config.mk are set according to your system’s configuration, then:

# make install clean

If you want to use nfy(1) with cron(8), make sure to export the X Display variable inside the script running nfy(1):

export DISPLAY=":0.0"

Alternatively, export the variable in the crontab file directly.

Send feedback and bugs to <christos@margiolis.net>.