Help w/ Minimal Notifications? (Pipes?)

Question

I am trying to instate a more minimally-graphic notification scenario in Arch Linux. Specifically, I've taken interest with programs such as dzen2 or conky that allow for more text-based status bars.

I was wondering if it was possible to pipe notifications (as in the libnotify, "notify-send" ones) to a status bar made from programs like dzen2 and conky. I currently use Openbox and like to switch WM's in a while, so advice that is more WM-agnostic is greatly appreciated.

If this question is too opinionated, a more concrete alternative would be where I can read more about status bars, or whether or not there is an easier or more standard/documented approach I could try.

Answer 1

I think you would be better off just removing libnotify and notify-send from the equation, given your stated requirements they do not provide any additional flexibility of functionality.

If you are looking for a minimal status bar, conky has a comprehensive amount of functionality, all of which can be updated in real time (depending upon how resource intensive you are prepared to accept it being).

If you wanted to tailor something specific to your setup, you could also use simple scripting and dzen.

You could also combine the two and pipe conky to dzen for your status bar; which also means that you can display icons in the bar, if that is what you are after.

There is a long conky thread on the Arch boards that has a myriad of different configurations and approaches to provide some inspiration.

For simple notifications, you could combine dzen and inotifywait (from the inotify-tools package) to achieve this. For example, I use this script to notify me when my nick is highlighted in IRC:

#!/bin/bash
dir="$HOME/Dropbox/Centurion/irssi/"

while inotifywait -qqre attrib "$dir" >/dev/null 2>&1; do
    echo "IRC:" "You have been pinged..." | dzen2 -p 5 
done