urxvt-ext-notify-osc

urxvt-ext-notify-osc is a urxvt OSC extension for desktop notifications.

In essence, this means that whenever a process prints a string like the following:

printf '\e]777;notify;alert user;the tea is ready\a'

urxvt creates a desktop notification with alert notification as summary and the tea is ready as the body. The terminal window also get its urgency hint set, which makes the window manager call your attention to it.

This works well even when a remote program in an ssh session prints the string. There is no dependency on X forwarding.

Installation

Manual installation

Requirements

• notify-send is used to create the notifications. It lives in the libnotify-bin Debian package.

• xseturgent is used to set the urgent hint. You can find in source form in github, or as a Debian package/repository in packagecloud. (disclaimer: I'm the author)

If one of these utilities is not present, the corresponding feature doesn't work.

Installing

Copy the notify-osc file to ~/.urxvt/ext.

Debian package

You can find a debian package in my packagecloud repository.

This options gets the dependencies sorted automatically.

Enabling

Add notify-osc to the list of enabled urxvt extensions in ~/.Xresources:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: ...,notify-osc

Reload the resources after editing that file by running:

xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources