terminal-notifier style notification never shows about alert

[seanfarley]

So, alert hasn't been popping up for me either. I've been using some amalgamation of sauron / alert and recently got rid of sauron so I thought it was that. After some googling and banging my head against the wall, I find this issue. Great! Other people have this problem.

So, I go to look at which asshole added the -sender flag: 556c630

[jwiegley]

I'll revert it.

[asimpson]

Update: I've tracked this down to the -sender flag. Removing this causes the notification to fire correctly. E.g.

(defun alert-notifier-notify (info)
  (if alert-notifier-command
      (let ((args
             (list "-title"   (alert-encode-string (plist-get info :title))
                   "-message" (alert-encode-string (plist-get info :message)))))
        (apply #'call-process alert-notifier-command nil nil nil args))
    (alert-message-notify info)))

[waisbrot]

Well! I was having this problem also, but it turns out not to be a problem. Sort of.

The issue is that when you identify the alert sender as Emacs, Mac OS will not display the alert when Emacs is in the foreground. This is consistent with all other Mac alerts. If you do something like

(progn (sleep-for 3)
       (alert "hello world"))

And then tab away from Emacs, I believe you'll see the alert working correctly.

[asimpson]

@waisbrot ah that makes sense, thank you! I'm going to have to figure out another way to be alerted for org related things when I'm in Emacs.

[waisbrot]

I was thinking about this last night. The problem is that while the Mac rule makes sense for normal applications (don't alert me about a new email when I'm in the middle of reading email), Emacs is more like an operating system here. I do want to be alerted about a new email when I'm editing some source code.

Therefore, it seems to me that what you and I want is to take away -sender and have Emacs manage the logic of "display an alert only if it's coming from an inactive buffer".

[asimpson]

Yep, that’s where I’ve landed as well. It might also make sense to explore a more “native” to Emacs notification approach, but I don’t know what that looks like at the moment.

[asimpson]

😂 Yeah that guy, what a moron 😂

[seanfarley]

Well, before it's reverted, we need to decide how clicking on a notification will bring up emacs, right?

[jwiegley]

It's better to revert, get back functionality for reporting notifications, and then decide that question. I never click on notifications from alert.el, so I hadn't even thought about the usefulness of this: although, it would be great to click on the bubble, and jump to the buffer that originating the warning.

[seanfarley]

Righto, totally agree. Though, just to point out, it's only for notifications when emacs is active (still works with -sender when not active ... didn't know if that was clear or not).