'Replace` mode

[vredesbyyrd]

Hi, thanks for sharing this tool, its quite awesome!

Would it be possible to implement a mode where only one notification can be displayed at a time? In pseudo code: timeout = 5sec or new notification received.

I'm trying to write a simple script that will display an album art notification on mpd track change events, and xnotify seems like the almost perfect tool for the job.

Maybe a way to flush the notification queue whenever stdin receives new data?

Thanks for your time

[phillbush]

Done!
The last commit add an -o command-line option (-o for “one notification at a time”) that implements this behavior.
Can you check whether this new version works as expected for you?

Also, I recommend you to use a tab between the album name and track title for better formatting.
(The text before a tab appears in bold and the text after the tab appears in a new line).

[vredesbyyrd]

Awesome, thanks for the quick patch and the formatting tips.

Although I cannot reproduce the expected behavior of the -o flag. Executing this twice as a test:

printf 'IMG:/home/clu/.cache/beet_mpd/1_big.jpg\thello\n' | xnotify -o -G NE -g 300x300-5+30 -s 5 &

...still results in multiple notifications "living" at the same time.

Prior to this commit, I was doing this for "one notification at a time", hackish, but did the job.

local notification = bp.echo(img) | bp.xnotify('-G', 'NE', '-g', '300x300-5+30', '-s', '3')

local cmd = bp.pgrep('-f', 'xnotify')
if #cmd() > 0 then
  os.execute('pkill xnotify')
  print(notification())
else
  print(notification())
end

Any thoughts on why this the -o flag is not working as expected on my end? Thanks again.

[phillbush]

I spotted the problem: you are spawning two xnotify instances.
You should create a pipe, spawn a single xnotify instance and make this instance read from the pipe.

Put the following at the beginning of your .xinitrc or .xsession file.

# create a variable pointing to the pipe
export XNOTIFY_FIFO="$HOME/.cache/xnotify$DISPLAY.fifo"

# remove the pipe, if it exists
rm -f $XNOTIFY_FIFO

# create the pipe
mkfifo $XNOTIFY_FIFO

# spawn xnotify reading from the pipe you just created
xnotify -o -G NE -g 300x300-5+30 -s 5 & <$XNOTIFY_FIFO 3<>$XNOTIFY_FIFO &

Each line is commented explaining what they do.

Then, you write the notification into the pipe file, whose name is contained in the variable $XNOTIFY_FIFO:

printf 'IMG:/home/clu/.cache/beet_mpd/1_big.jpg\ttitle\tbody\n' >$XNOTIFY_FIFO

Anytime you want to create a notification, just write it into $XNOTIFY_FIFO.

[vredesbyyrd]

Got it. My bad, i suspected that we might need to write to a fifo for this to work, and thought I already tried to do so, apparently not :/ Everything works as advertised now.. Appreciate the walk through.

Congrats on this light and powerful piece of software, good stuff!