Daemon-less notifications without D-Bus. Minimal and lightweight.

• Under 200 lines of code
• Doesn't run in the background, just displays the notification and exits
• No external dependencies except Xlib and Xft
• Configurable through config.h or Xresources (using this patch)
• Actions support
• Extensible through patches

• Usage
  • Patches
  • Dismiss a notification
  • Actions
  • Newlines
  • Multiple notifications
  • Notifications don't show up
• Installation
  • Packages
  • Dependencies
  • Build
• Configuration
• Contribute

List of available patches

To create a new patch you'll have to open a pull request with your changes. Append .diff to the pull request URL to get a downloadable diff file. Don't forget to prefix the title with patch: and to apply the patch label to it. For inspiration, look at my Xresources patch. Thank you.

Note: This patching method was heavily inspired by dylan's sowm.

A notification can be dismissed either by clicking on it with DISMISS_BUTTON (set in config.h, defaults to left mouse button) or sending a SIGUSR1 signal to it:

$ pkill -SIGUSR1 herbe

Dismissed notifications return exit code 2.

Action is a piece of shell code that runs when a notification gets accepted. Accepting a notification is the same as dismissing it, but you have to use either ACTION_BUTTON (defaults to right mouse button) or the SIGUSR2 signal. An accepted notification always returns exit code 0. To specify an action:

$ herbe "Notification body" && echo "This is an action"

Where everything after && is the action and will get executed after the notification gets accepted.

Every command line argument gets printed on a separate line by default e.g.:

$ herbe "First line" "Second line" "Third line" ...

You can also use \n e.g. in bash:

$ herbe $'First line\nSecond line\nThird line'

But by default herbe prints \n literally:

$ herbe "First line\nStill the first line"

Output of other programs will get printed correctly, just make sure to escape it (so you don't end up with every word on a separate line):

$ herbe "$(ps axch -o cmd:15,%cpu --sort=-%cpu | head)"

Notifications are put in a queue and shown one after another in order of creation (first in, first out). They don't overlap and each one is shown for its entire duration.

Most likely a running notification got terminated forcefully (SIGKILL or any uncaught signal) which caused the semaphore not getting unlocked. First, kill any herbe instance that is stuck:

$ pkill -SIGKILL herbe

Then just call herbe without any arguments:

$ herbe

Notifications should now show up as expected.

Don't ever send any signals to herbe except these:

# same as pkill -SIGTERM herbe, terminates every running herbe process
$ pkill herbe

$ pkill -SIGUSR1 herbe
$ pkill -SIGUSR2 herbe

And you should be fine. That's all you really need to interact with herbe.

OpenBSD patch

FreeBSD patch

Wayland port by muevoid

Only the herbe-git AUR package is maintained by me.

• X11 (Xlib)
• Xft

The names of packages are different depending on which distribution you use. For example, if you use Void Linux you will have to install these dependencies:

sudo xbps-install base-devel libX11-devel libXft-devel

git clone https://github.com/dudik/herbe
cd herbe
sudo make install

make install requires root privileges because it copies the resulting binary to /usr/local/bin. This makes herbe accessible globally.

You can also use make clean to remove the binary from the build folder, sudo make uninstall to remove the binary from /usr/local/bin or just make to build the binary locally.

herbe is configured at compile-time by editing config.h. Every option should be self-explanatory. There is no height option because height is determined by font size and text padding.

Xresources patch

If you want to report a bug or you have a feature request, feel free to open an issue.

• qutebrowser supports showing web notifications via herbe, via the content.notifications.presenter setting.