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boywithaxe
Asked: 2012-02-06 04:45:34 +0800 CST

Clickable Gnome-style notifications in Unity

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I was looking for a way to get gnome style notifications in Unity. Or at least, if there´s a way of making the default Unity notifications interactive and clickable? As it is by default only a notification pops up and the user needs to find the relevant window, which I find very counterproductive.

gnome unity

2 Answers

  1. You can have clickable notification with Unity.

    Tested with 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10, 16.04 (thanks @ManseUK).

    What we want

    Notification are supposed to non-obstrusive, non-disrupting of your train of thought, and provide a shortcut when relevant.

    Problem in Unity (, at least)

    Default notification engine is notify-osd.

    • notifications are not clickable (which hurts efficiency for those that offer to quickly bring you to the place of interest).
    • when several happen quickly, they queue and appear only one after the other : no way to see them quickly, you just have to ... wait.

    Solution

    Current XFCE notifications on the other hand implement just that, and they can be used with Unity. I just tested it with a separate account (default config) to rule out any user-specific settings.

    Howto

    Here's how install and use XFCE4's notifications instead of Unity's:

    sudo apt-get install xfce4-notifyd ; sudo apt-get purge notify-osd

    To get immediate effect this may help (else logout/login):

    killall -v notify-osd
/usr/lib/*/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd &

    You might want to test and adjust appearance:

    xfce4-notifyd-config
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  2. Best Answer

    Sorry, this is not possible.

    Ubuntu's notification system, NotifyOSD, as used by Unity, is designed to be un-clickable, in order to simplify the experience and not confuse users. There is no way to change that.

    Gnome Shell, on the other hand, uses another built-in notification system that behaves differently to NotifyOSD, as explained in this LXNews article

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