A notification daemon for Linux, written in Go. It owns org.freedesktop.Notifications on the session bus and hands every notification to sysc-shell, which draws the popups, the notification centre and the history.

The daemon has no windows of its own. It keeps the state: what is active, when it expires, and what went into history. When the shell restarts, it picks up exactly where it left off.

• Freedesktop spec 1.3: replacement IDs, expiry, actions, close reasons and the NotificationClosed / ActionInvoked signals
• Inline replies: the KDE x-kde-reply-placeholder-text hint and the NotificationReplied signal, so chat apps can take a reply from the popup
• Images: image-data, the older image_data / icon_data aliases, and image-path as a file path, a file:// URI or a theme icon name. Large images are scaled to 512 px, and a malformed image is dropped rather than the notification
• Progress and urgency: the value hint for progress bars. When more than 128 notifications are active at once, the oldest non-critical one makes room
• History: up to 100 closed notifications, kept for 7 days and saved across restarts. Transient notifications, and ones marked x-sysc-private, are never written to disk
• Survives the shell: notifications keep arriving while the shell is down or restarting, and it gets the full state back when it reconnects
• Sender tracking: records which process sent a notification, so clicking it can focus the sender's Niri window. If more than one window matches, the shell focuses none rather than guess

Requires: Go 1.26+ and a D-Bus session bus.

git clone https://github.com/Nomadcxx/sysc-notify
cd sysc-notify
go build -o ~/.local/bin/sysc-notify ./cmd/sysc-notify

GOBIN="$HOME/.local/bin" go install github.com/Nomadcxx/sysc-notify/cmd/sysc-notify@latest

install -Dm644 contrib/sysc-notify.service ~/.config/systemd/user/sysc-notify.service
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now sysc-notify.service

Only one program can own the notification bus name. Stop mako, dunst, swaync or whatever you ran before, or sysc-notify exits at startup and systemd keeps restarting it. A daemon that is D-Bus activatable (xfce4-notifyd ships that way) can also grab the name if a notification arrives before sysc-notify is up.

Check which process owns the name:

busctl --user status org.freedesktop.Notifications | grep -E '^(PID|Comm)='

Anything that sends desktop notifications works as-is:

notify-send "Build finished" "All tests passed"
notify-send -i dialog-information -u critical "Disk almost full"

sysc-shell shows them as popups and keeps closed ones in its notification history. The daemon takes no flags. It needs XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, and it stops cleanly on SIGINT or SIGTERM.

sysc-shell is one client of the presenter socket, not the only possible one. The wire types live in the public protocol package:

go get github.com/Nomadcxx/sysc-notify/protocol

A presenter connects, sends a hello, and gets a snapshot of every active notification and the history, then a stream of changes. It reports what it is showing so expiry pauses while you hover a popup. A second presenter that connects replaces the first. The types in protocol/ are the reference.

go vet ./...
go test -race -count=1 ./...
dbus-run-session -- go test -race -count=1 ./tests/integration/

BSD-3-Clause

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