Dunst desktop notification daemon

[OscarTalks]

Website for it is here https://dunst-project.org/
Version 1.9.0 released in June 2022 introduces "recursive icon lookup" which searches extensively through your icon themes to display suitable icons along with text in notification messages.

I have been compiling it to test with "PREFIX=/usr SYSCONFDIR=/etc/xdg SYSCONFFILE=/etc/xdg/dunst/dunstrc SYSTEMD=0 WAYLAND=0" on all "make" calls.
Running "make test" passes all the tests.
No need to autostart it because dbus launches it when required.
Having the system-wide config file at /etc/xdg/dunst/dunstrc means no need to install any config files under /root and it should work also for programs running as spot.
I have made a few alterations to the config file, but users may wish to study the documentation and add their own.

It is very small and light and this version seems to be working well in my tests. Earlier versions have been included in some previous Puppies. Not sure how appealing it is overall though and whether some of the functions in Puppy can be adapted to actually use it for popping up relevant information. As things stand there do not seem to be be many things that trigger it. Transmission does, and my builds of Audacious do, although you have to enable notifications in the respective Preferences windows.

I will post some builds for testing here and/or in the threads of specific Puppy versions
Users are invited to comment or suggest ways Dunst could be better-used in Puppy

[step]

notify-send triggers dunst. Notify-send is usually included in all distros. Better than notify-send is dunstify, which is included in dust's source distribution. It used to be that dustify was only an internal test tool for dunst, but I think it's been elevated to public status since 1.9.0.

[OscarTalks]

Hello step,
Yes, the dunstify executable is included in dunst-1.9.0 and it is in those packages. The dunst daemon is starting and running correctly as far as I can tell, but when it gets triggered by applications like Audacious or Transmission it is mostly only repeating information which I can already see in the GUI of the program itself. It would be much more useful if it were popping up messages from other components of the system and providing useful information. Maybe some elements of the software can be modified to achieve this, but I haven't really figured all that out yet. Others may have a better understanding than me when it comes to such things.

[step]

My understanding is that dunst of itself doesn't gather any information. It can only display data gathered and sent by applications to dunst. Normally compiled applications use libnotify for this, they link with libnotify. Shell scripts can send data with commands such as notify-send and dunstify (there are others), and I think also via dbus. Dunst is the default notification daemon on Fatdog64. I seldom see notifications coming from compiled applications. I've always assumed that most applications that are typical for Fatdog64 simply don't bother sending notifications around. I see that major distributions pop up lots of notifications, and speculate that it's the Desktop Environment software that generates most of them. All assumptions and speculations of mine, nothing conclusive.