statnot

libnotify is kind of the standard for desktop notifications. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of dbus and friends, but libnotify has become a necessary evil. The popular notification daemons tend to be a little overkill, and I was hoping to integrate my notifications with a cannibalized version of a popup that uses lemonbar (thanks z3bra!). Rather than getting another notification center that required it’s own extra styling, I looked around for a libnotify daemon that would call a shell script and pass it the notification contents.

Initially, I was going to write a C program on my own, but the awful lack of C documentation for libnotify coupled with the hate of dbus, I eventually found a non-sucky python script that did what I wanted.

statnot, is very simple to configure. Just add the following to ~/.config/statnot/statnotrc:

STATUS_COMMAND = ['/bin/sh', '/home/ninjacharlie/bin/popup']

And add this to ~/.xinitrc:

...
statnot /home/ninjacharlie/.config/statnot/statnotrc &
...

Once you restart X, you should see notifications pop up when you pause/play Spotify songs or run a notify-send command.