My blog_title_here

I've delayed update of the whole libnotify / notification-daemon / notify-python stack for a while now, because notification-daemon got too GNOME-oriented around 0.7, making it a lot more simpler, but sadly dropping lots of good stuff I've used there.

Default nice-looking theme is gone in favor of black blobs (although colors are probably subject to gtkrc); it's one-note-at-a-time only, which makes reading them intolerable; configurability was dropped as well, guess blobs follow some gnome-panel settings now.

Older notification-daemon versions won't build with newer libnotify.

Same problem with notify-python, which seem to be unnecessary now, since it's functionality is accessible via introspection and PyGObject (part known as PyGI before merge - gi.repositories.Notify).

Looking for more-or-less drop-in replacements I've found notipy project, which looked like what I needed, and the best part is that it's python - no need to filter notification requests in a proxy anymore, eliminating some associated complexity.

Project has a bit different goals however, them being simplicity, less deps and concept separation, so I incorporated (more-or-less) notipy as a simple NotificationDisplay class into notification-proxy, making it into notification-thing (first name that came to mind, not that it matters).

All the rendering now is in python using PyGObject (gi) / gtk-3.0 toolkit, which seem to be a good idea, given that I still have no reason to keep Qt in my system, and gtk-2.0 being obsolete.

Exploring newer Gtk stuff like css styling and honest auto-generated interfaces was fun, although the whole mess seem to be much harder than expected. Simple things like adding a border, margins or some non-solid background to existing widgets seem to be very complex and totally counter-intuitive, unlike say, doing the same (even in totally cross-browser fashion) with html. I also failed to find a way to just draw what I want on arbitrary widgets, looks like it was removed (in favor of GtkDrawable) on purpose.

My (uneducated) guess is that gtk authors geared toward "one way to do one thing" philosophy, but unlike Python motto, they've to ditch the "one *obvious* way" part. But then, maybe it's just me being too lazy to read docs properly.

Source link.

All the previous features like filtering and rate-limiting are there.