plain text notification daemon
painted is a dead simple notification daemon: it reads commands from a file (which may be a UNIX socket for IPC or any text file such as stdin for simplicity), notifications from dbus, and writes output to a given file (usually stdout). It aims to be a UNIX-ish replacement for standard notification daemons, primarily for usage with bars.
Despite the name (a rough contraction of the initialism PTND, for Plain Text Notification Daemon), the scope of Painted is not limited to plain text: planned features include actions, sounds, and more. The goal is to achieve 'minimalism' through an unrestrictive design that facilitates scripting, run-time modification, and, of course, completeness.
If on NixOS, you can access this as a Flake or nix build it. Or, build with a go
compiler of at least 1.17: go build ./cmd/painted.
See painted(1). (If you've just got the source checked out, you can run man ./painted.1 to view the equivalent man page.)
Check the contrib/ folder for some config files that invoke painted in a way that makes sense. Note that the contrib directory isn't super well-maintained, and just exists as a dumping ground for stuff that you may or may not want to use1.
This isn't supposed to be one of those highly minimal UNIX utilities, but it's also not supposed to be massive. That said, here's what I'm currently wanting to implement:
- Basic:
- Actually record notifications (obviously)
- Notification history and navigation
- persistence
- Command matching by prefix (i.e., only
prto activatepreviousso long as no other command begins withpr) - notification format strings
- body text
- Additional (everything necessary for a 1.0.0):
- Actions
- Docs
- Man page packaged in Nix.
- Unneeded, but nice:
- Do not disturb mode
- Sounds
Painted roughly follows SemVer. Changes are documented in annotated git tags. To
view the release notes for a given release, run git show v[release-number],
for example, git show v0.1.0.