Snooty

About

Snooty is a simple DBus notification daemon for StumpWM which sports a rudimentary plugin system. Notifications can be displayed either through stumpwm:message, contrib/notifications.lisp, or both.

Usage

Installation

You can simply execute:

$ python snooty.py &

or add the above to wherever you launch your userland daemons once X starts. Because Snooty is written in Python, it uses stumpish in order to communicate with StumpWM, and thus it is necessary that your PATH be configured accordingly.

Configuration

Current configuration options are as follows.

message_format

The format of the notification as displayed by stumpwm:message. Currently, the possible formatters include %a for the application name, %s for the summary or title of the notification, and %b for the body of the notification.

notifications_format

This is the format of the notification for use with notifications-add as provided by contrib/notifications.lisp. The available formatters are equivalent to the above.

max_line_width

This is the maximum line width for notifications displayed using stumpwm:message.

use_message

Should we display notifications using stumpwm:message?

use_notifications

Should we display notifications using notifications-add?

plugins

This is a whitelist of available plugins that should be loaded when the daemon starts.

Bugs

There are a number of known bugs that can make using this software annoying.

• Snooty is not actually a daemon. I have yet to write the code for daemonizing Snooty and controlling the resulting process. To run Snooty in the background using bash, zsh, or similar, execute:

  $ python snooty.py & disown
  

  To stop Snooty, you must find the pid and kill it.

• Currently there is no support for translations. I simply haven't gotten around to implementing localizations, thus everything is hardcoded in English.

• Plugins run in the main thread. This means you have to be very careful in how you design them (e.g., using timeouts instead of hogging the processor).

• When a plugin fails to load, so does the daemon. Any exception raised during the loading of a plugin is not caught, and will thus prevent the daemon from starting. This can be particularly annoying if you have plugins listed in the plugins configuration option that you don't have the dependencies to run (e.g., a wicd plugin when you use NetworkManager).

Plugins

By default, Snooty only displays notifications announced through org.freedesktop.Notifications.Notify. To make the daemon more useful, additional functionality may be provided via plugins. A plugin is simply a Python package in the plugins directory, with the __init__.py file containing a run() function which acts as an entry point. The magic variables snooty and this are set within the package when the plugin is loaded. snooty is a reference to our instance of the Snooty class, and this refers to the package itself (similar to self for Python classes). All included plugins are listed below.

pidgin

This plugin provides notifications for some of the more common events in the pidgin instant messaging client, in particular: instant message received, new conversation started, buddy signed on, and buddy signed off.

Configuration

The available configuration options are the following.

new_message

Send a notification when a new message is received, but the conversation does not currently have focus.

new_conversations_only

Only send a notification for a new message when that message initiates a new conversation.

buddy_signed_on

Self-explanatory.

buddy_signed_off

Also self-explanatory.

Bugs

• Currently, when buddy_signed_on is enabled, and the user signs on, a flood of notifications occurs. The fix for this is simple, I just have to get around to it.

wicd

A simple plugin to announce your network connectivity status using wicd. Currently, notifications are given for "Disconnected," "Connecting," and "Connected" statuses.