CLI bard — See all your last notifications in the terminal

The CLI bard is a very simple command line application that displays the last notifications received on the D-Bus (the common notification system under Linux).

It is not an interactive application, it just displays incoming notifications. At any time, as much as possible of the last notifications are displayed. The display refreshes when a notification is received.

The CLI bard is written in Python and is available under the AGPLv3 license.

Install

The CLI bard relies on your terminal using a font patched with the "Powerline" characters. The recommended fonts are the ones from the Nerd font project.

Usage

Command arguments

usage: clibard.py [-h] [-l {h,v,horizontal,vertical}] [--test NB_ITEMS] [--send NB_ITEMS]

options: -h, --help show this help message and exit -l {h,v,horizontal,vertical}, --layout {h,v,horizontal,vertical} How to display notifications. horizontal = as many of the last notifications that fit on a single line, clear out the old ones. vertical = keep printing new notifications on new lines. --test NB_ITEMS Print NB_ITEMS fake notifications and quit. --send NB_ITEMS Send NB_ITEMS fake notifications on the D-Bus and quit.

Display

Each notification is displayed as a colored block made of up to four segments, showing in order:

the date,
the application having issued the notification,
the summary of the notification (e.g. chat systems usually display the user, here),
the body of the message.

The color of the notification block's application and summary depends on the urgency of the notification:

low in green,
normal in blue,
critical in orange,
unknown in light purple.

Signaling

The CLI bard does respond to POSIX "user signals". Signals can be issued with the kill command, using the --signal flag along with 10 (SIGUSR1) or 12 (SIGUSR2) as an argument. SIGUSR1 will refresh the display, SIGUSR2 will erase any notification in the cache and clear the display (if it can).

Note that with the horizontal layout, refreshing the display actually changes the display. Erasing the cache will remove any on-screen notification if you use the horizontal layout. With the vertical layout, this does nothing on the display.

Layouts

The default layout is the horizontal one.

Horizontal

This will display on a single line, and overwrite it as soon as an update is received. Dates are given in a "natural" human-readable way. When refreshing its display in the horizontal layout, the displayed dates will be refreshed as well. However, it does not show all the cached notifications, but only the few last ones that can fit the current width of the terminal.

Vertical

The vertical layout simply prints a new line as soon as the CLI bard receive a notification. The display cannot be cleared nor refreshed. Most notably, date is displayed in the ISO-8601 format, down to the minute. However, your terminal should retain all the received notifications, if you can scroll back enough.

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