NAME

dunst - configuration file

DESCRIPTION

The configuration is divided into sections in an ini-like format. Every section start with the section's name in square brackets. After that is a list of key-value pairs that specify the settings. Whitespace is purely cosmetic and doesn't matter for the result.

The 'global' section contains the general settings applying to all of dunst. The rest of the settings can be specified via rules and can be located in any section. These rules can change a notification based on it's properties. There are filtering rules and modifying rules. The filtering rules specify on what notifications the rule is applied and the modifying rules specify what is changed about the matching notifications. Some special sections have implied filters that cannot be changed. The "global" section, for example has no filters, thus applies to all notifications.

See RULES for more details.

The 'experimental' section contains all the features that have not yet been tested thoroughly and may be changed at any time.

Global section

monitor (default: 0)

Specifies on which monitor the notifications should be displayed in, count starts at 0. See the follow setting.

follow (values: [none/mouse/keyboard] default: none)

Defines where the notifications should be placed in a multi-monitor setup. All values except none override the monitor setting.

On Wayland there is no difference between mouse and keyboard focus. When either of the is used, the compositor will choose an output. This will generally be the output last interacted with.

none: The notifications will be placed on the monitor specified by the monitor setting.
mouse: The notifications will be placed on the monitor that the mouse is currently in.
keyboard: The notifications will be placed on the monitor that contains the window with keyboard focus.

geometry DEPRECATED

This setting is deprecated. It's split up into width, height, origin, notification_limit and offset.

width

The width of the notification window in pixels. This can be a single number to specify a constant width or two numbers for the minimum and maximum width. The notification will expand from the minimum width as neccesary.

Examples: width = 300 # constant width of 300 width = (0, 300) # width between 0 and 300

height

The maximum height of a single notification.

notification_limit (default: 0)

The number of notifications that can appear at one time. When this limit is reached any additional notifications will be queued and displayed when the currently displayed ones either time out or are manually dismissed. The value 0 means no limit. If indicate_hidden is true, then the specified limit is reduced by 1 and the last notification is a message informing how many hidden notifications are waiting to be displayed. See the indicate_hidden entry for more information.

origin (default: top-right)

The origin of the notification window on the screen. It can then be moved with offset. Origin can be one of: top-left top-center top-right bottom-left bottom-center bottom-right left-center center right-center

offset format: (horizontal, vertical)

Respectively the horizontal and vertical offset in pixels from the corner of the screen specified by origin. Both values should always be positive or zero.

Examples: origin = top-right offset = 10x300 # a margin of 10 pixels from the right and 300 pixels from the top

scale (default: 0, X11 only)

Specifies a scale factor for dimensions to adapt notifications to HiDPI screens. This scales the notification geometry and it's contents. It is not recommended to use a fractional scaling factor, as this may result in things being one pixel off. Try to use a whole number scaling factor and adjust the font size and other sizes as needed. If 0 is specified, the scale factor is auto-detected.

progress_bar (values: [true/false], default: true)

When an integer value is passed to dunst as a hint (see NOTIFY-SEND), a progress bar will be drawn at the bottom of the notification. This behavior can be turned off by setting this setting to false.

progress_bar_height (default: 10)

The height of the progress bar in pixel. This includes the frame. Make sure this value is bigger than twice the frame width.

progress_bar_min_width (default: 150)

The minimum width of the progress bar in pixels. The notification is rescaled to fit the bar.

progress_bar_max_width (default: 300)

The maximum width of the progress bar in pixels. The notification is resized to fit the progress bar.

progress_bar_frame_width (default: 1)

The frame width of the progress bar in pixels. This value should be smaller than half of the progress bar height.

indicate_hidden (values: [true/false], default: true)

If this is set to true, a notification indicating how many notifications are not being displayed due to the notification limit (see notification_limit) will be shown in place of the last notification slot.

Meaning that if this is enabled the number of visible notifications will be 1 less than what is specified by notification_limit, the last slot will be taken by the hidden count.

transparency (default: 0) (X11 only)

A 0-100 range on how transparent the notification window should be, with 0 being fully opaque and 100 invisible.

To make windows transparent on wayland, set the transparency part of a color, see COLORS.

This setting will only work if a compositor is running.

separator_height (default: 2)

The height in pixels of the separator between notifications, if set to 0 there will be no separating line between notifications.

padding (default: 0)

The distance in pixels from the content to the separator/border of the window in the vertical axis

horizontal_padding (default: 0)

The distance in pixels from the content to the border of the window in the horizontal axis

text_icon_padding (default: 0)

The distance in pixels from the text to the icon (or vice versa) in the horizontal axis.

Setting this to a non-zero value overwrites any padding that horizontal_padding was adding between the notification text and icon.

So for example setting

text_icon_padding=10
horizontal_padding=10

is equivalent to

text_icon_padding=0
horizontal_padding=10

frame_width (default: 0)

Defines width in pixels of frame around the notification window. Set to 0 to disable.

frame_color color (default: #888888)

Defines color of the frame around the notification window. See COLORS.

separator_color (values: [auto/foreground/frame/#RRGGBB] default: auto)

Sets the color of the separator line between two notifications.

auto: Dunst tries to find a color that fits the rest of the notification color scheme automatically.
foreground: The color will be set to the same as the foreground color of the topmost notification that's being separated.
frame: The color will be set to the frame color of the notification with the highest urgency between the 2 notifications that are being separated.
anything else: Any other value is interpreted as a color, see COLORS

sort (values: [true/false], default: true)

If set to true, display notifications with higher urgency above the others.

idle_threshold (default: 0)

Don't timeout notifications if user is idle longer than this time. See TIME FORMAT for valid times.

Set to 0 to disable.

A client can mark a notification as transient to bypass this setting and timeout anyway. Use a rule with 'set_transient = no' to disable this behavior.

Note: this doesn't work on xwayland.

layer (Wayland only)

One of bottom, top or overlay.

Place dunst notifications on the selected layer. Using overlay will cause notifications to be displayed above fullscreen windows, though this may also occur at top depending on your compositor.

The bottom layer is below all windows and above the background.

Default: overlay

force_xwayland (values: [true/false], default: false) (Wayland only)

Force the use of X11 output, even on a wayland compositor. This setting has no effect when not using a Wayland compositor.

font (default: "Monospace 8")

Defines the font or font set used. Optionally set the size as a decimal number after the font name and space. Multiple font options can be separated with commas.

This options is parsed as a Pango font description.

line_height (default: 0)

The amount of extra spacing between text lines in pixels. Set to 0 to disable.

markup (values: [full/strip/no], default: no)

Defines how markup in notifications is handled.

It's important to note that markup in the format option will be parsed regardless of what this is set to.

Possible values:

full

Allow a small subset of html markup in notifications

<b>bold</b>
<i>italic</i>
<s>strikethrough</s>
<u>underline</u>

For a complete reference see <https://developer.gnome.org/pango/stable/pango-Markup.html>

strip

This setting is provided for compatibility with some broken clients that send markup even though it's not enabled on the server.

Dunst will try to strip the markup but the parsing is simplistic so using this option outside of matching rules for specific applications IS GREATLY DISCOURAGED.

See RULES

no

Disable markup parsing, incoming notifications will be treated as plain text. Dunst will not advertise that it can parse markup if this is set as a global setting.

format (default: "%s %b")

Specifies how the various attributes of the notification should be formatted on the notification window.

Regardless of the status of the markup setting, any markup tags that are present in the format will be parsed. Note that because of that, if a literal ampersand (&) is needed it needs to be escaped as '&'

If '\n' is present anywhere in the format, it will be replaced with a literal newline.

If any of the following strings are present, they will be replaced with the equivalent notification attribute.

%a appname
%s summary
%b body
%i iconname (including its path)
%I iconname (without its path)
%p progress value ([ 0%] to [100%])
%n progress value without any extra characters
%% Literal %

If any of these exists in the format but hasn't been specified in the notification (e.g. no icon has been set), the placeholders will simply be removed from the format.

vertical_alignment (values: [top/center/bottom], default: center)

Defines how the text and icon should be aligned vertically within the notification. If icons are disabled, this option has no effect.

show_age_threshold (default: -1)

Show age of message if message is older than this time. See TIME FORMAT for valid times.

Set to -1 to disable.

ignore_newline (values: [true/false], default: false)

If set to true, replace newline characters in notifications with whitespace.

stack_duplicates (values: [true/false], default: true)

If set to true, duplicate notifications will be stacked together instead of being displayed separately.

Two notifications are considered duplicate if the name of the program that sent it, summary, body, icon and urgency are all identical.

hide_duplicate_count (values: [true/false], default: false)

Hide the count of stacked duplicate notifications.

show_indicators (values: [true/false], default: true)

Show an indicator if a notification contains actions and/or open-able URLs. See ACTIONS below for further details.

icon_position (values: [left/right/off], default: off)

Defines the position of the icon in the notification window. Setting it to off disables icons.

min_icon_size (default: 0)

Defines the minimum size in pixels for the icons. If the icon is larger than or equal to the specified value it won't be affected. If it's smaller then it will be scaled up so that the smaller axis is equivalent to the specified size.

Set to 0 to disable icon upscaling. (default)

If icon_position is set to off, this setting is ignored.

max_icon_size (default: 0)

Defines the maximum size in pixels for the icons. If the icon is smaller than or equal to the specified value it won't be affected. If it's larger then it will be scaled down so that the larger axis is equivalent to the specified size.

Set to 0 to disable icon downscaling. (default)

If both min_icon_size and max_icon_size are enabled, the latter gets the last say.

If icon_position is set to off, this setting is ignored.

icon_path (default: "/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/status/:/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/devices/")

Can be set to a colon-separated list of paths to search for icons to use with notifications.

Dunst doesn't currently do any type of icon lookup outside of these directories.

sticky_history (values: [true/false], default: true)

If set to true, notifications that have been recalled from history will not time out automatically.

history_length (default: 20)

Maximum number of notifications that will be kept in history. After that limit is reached, older notifications will be deleted once a new one arrives. See HISTORY.

dmenu (default: "/usr/bin/dmenu")

The command that will be run when opening the context menu. Should be either a dmenu command or a dmenu-compatible menu.

browser (default: "/usr/bin/xdg-open")

The command that will be run when opening a URL. The URL to be opened will be appended to the end of the value of this setting.

always_run_script (values: [true/false] default: true]

Always run rule-defined scripts, even if the notification is suppressed with format = "". See SCRIPTING.

title (default: "Dunst")

Defines the title of notification windows spawned by dunst. (_NET_WM_NAME property). There should be no need to modify this setting for regular use.

class (default: "Dunst")

Defines the class of notification windows spawned by dunst. (First part of WM_CLASS). There should be no need to modify this setting for regular use.

force_xinerama (values: [true/false], default: false) (X11 only)

Use the Xinerama extension instead of RandR for multi-monitor support. This setting is provided for compatibility with older nVidia drivers that do not support RandR and using it on systems that support RandR is highly discouraged.

By enabling this setting dunst will not be able to detect when a monitor is connected or disconnected which might break follow mode if the screen layout changes.

corner_radius (default: 0)

Define the corner radius in pixels. A corner radius of 0 will result in rectangular shaped notifications.

By enabling this setting the outer border and the frame will be shaped. If you have multiple notifications, the whole window is shaped, not every single notification.

To avoid the corners clipping the icon or text the corner radius will be automatically lowered to half of the notification height if it exceeds it.

mouse_left/middle/right_click (values: [none/do_action/close_current/close_all/context/context_all])

Defines action of mouse click. A touch input in Wayland acts as a mouse left click.

none: Don't do anything.
do_action (default for mouse_middle_click): Invoke the action determined by the action_name rule. If there is no such action, open the context menu.
open_url: If the notification has exactly one url, open it. If there are multiple ones, open the context menu.
close_current (default for mouse_left_click): Close current notification.
close_all (default for mouse_right_click): Close all notifications.
context: Open context menu for the notification.
context_all: Open context menu for all notifications.

ignore_dbusclose (default: false)

Ignore the dbus closeNotification message. This is useful to enforce the timeout set by dunst configuration. Without this parameter, an application may close the notification sent before the user defined timeout.

Urgency sections

The urgency sections work in a similar way to rules and can be used to specify attributes for the different urgency levels of notifications (low, normal, critical). Currently only the background, foreground, hightlight, timeout, frame_color and icon attributes can be modified.

The urgency sections are urgency_low, urgency_normal, urgency_critical for low, normal and critical urgency respectively.

See the example configuration file for examples.

Additionally, you can override these settings via the following command line flags:

Please note these flags may be removed in the future. See issue #328 in the bug tracker for discussions (See REPORTING BUGS).

-li/ni/ci icon

Defines the icon for low, normal and critical notifications respectively.

Where icon is a path to an image file containing the icon.

-lf/nf/cf color

Defines the foreground color for low, normal and critical notifications respectively.

See COLORS for the value format.

-lb/nb/cb color

Defines the background color for low, normal and critical notifications respectively.

See COLORS for the value format.

-lh/nh/ch color

Defines the highlight color for low, normal and critical notifications respectively.

See COLORS for the value format.

-lfr/nfr/cfr color

Defines the frame color for low, normal and critical notifications respectively.

See COLORS for more information

-lto/nto/cto secs

Defines the timeout time for low, normal and critical notifications respectively. See TIME FORMAT for valid times.

DUNSTCTL

Dunst now contains a command line control command that can be used to interact with it. It supports all functions previously done only via keyboard shortcuts but also has a lot of extra functionality. For more information, see dunstctl(1).

HISTORY

Dunst saves a number of notifications (specified by history_length) in memory. These notifications can be recalled (i.e. redisplayed) by calling dunstctl history (see dunstctl(1)). Whether these notifications will time out like if they have been just send depends on the value of the sticky_history setting. Actions are invalidated once the notification is closed, so you cannot execute that action when you bring back a notification from history.

Past notifications are redisplayed in a first-in-last-out order, meaning that pressing the history key once will bring up the most recent notification that had been closed/timed out.

WAYLAND

Dunst has Wayland support since version 1.6.0. Because the Wayland protocol is more focused on security, some things that are possible in X11 are not possible in Wayland. Those differences are reflected in the configuration. The main things that change are that dunst on Wayland cannot use global hotkeys (they are deprecated anyways, use dunstctl).

Some dunst features on wayland might need your compositor to support a certain protocol. Dunst will warn you if an optional feature isn't supported and will disable the corresponding functionality.

Fullscreen detection works on wayland with some limitations (see fullscreen). If you want notifications to appear over fullscreen windows, set layer = overlay in the global options.

Note that the same limitations exist when using xwayland. If something doesn't quite work in Wayland, please file a bug report. In the mean time, you can try if the X11 output does work on wayland. Use force_xwayland = true for that.

If you have your dunst notifications on the same side of your display as your status bar, you might notice that your notifications appear a bit higher or lower than on X11. This is because the notification cannot be placed on top of your status bar. The notifications are placed relative to your status bar, making them appear higher or lower by the height of your status bar. We cannot do anything about that behavior.

RULES

Rules allow the conditional modification of notifications. They can be located in a section with any name, even the special sections. The special sections do not allow filters to be added, since they have implied filters by default.

'global': No filters, matches all notifications.
'urgency_low', 'urgency_normal' and 'urgency_critical': Matches low, normal or critical urgency respectively.

There are 2 parts in configuring a rule: Defining the filters that controls when a rule should apply and then the actions that should be taken when the rule is matched. It's also possible to not specify any filters, in which case the rule will match all notifications.

Rules are applied in order of appearance. Beware: if a notification is changed by a rule, it may affect if it's being matched by a later rule.

filtering

Notifications can be matched for any of the following attributes:

appname (discouraged, see desktop_entry)

The name of the application as reported by the client. Be aware that the name can often differ depending on the locale used.

body

The body of the notification

category

The category of the notification as defined by the notification spec. See https://specifications.freedesktop.org/notification-spec/notification-spec-latest.html#categories.

desktop_entry

GLib based applications export their desktop-entry name. In comparison to the appname, the desktop-entry won't get localized.

icon

The icon of the notification in the form of a file path. Can be empty if no icon is available or a raw icon is used instead.

match_transient

Match if the notification has been declared as transient by the client or by some other rule.

See set_transient for more details about this attribute.

msg_urgency

Matches the urgency of the notification as set by the client or by some other rule.

stack_tag

Matches the stack tag of the notification as set by the client or by some other rule.

See set_stack_tag for more information about stack tags.

summary

Matches the summary, 'title', of the notification.

msg_urgency is the urgency of the notification, it is named so to not conflict with trying to modify the urgency.

Instead of the appname filter, it's recommended to use the desktop_entry filter.

To define a matching rule simply assign the specified value to the value that should be matched, for example:

appname="notify-send"

Matches only messages that were send via notify-send. If multiple filter expressions are present, all of them have to match for the rule to be applied (logical AND).

Shell-like globing is supported.

modifying

The following attributes can be overridden:

background

The background color of the notification. See COLORS for possible values.

foreground

The foreground color of the notification. See COLORS for possible values.

highlight

The highlight color of the notification. This color is used for coloring the progress bar. See COLORS for possible values.

format

Equivalent to the format setting.

frame_color

The frame color color of the notification. See COLORS for possible values.

fullscreen

One of show, delay, or pushback.

This attribute specifies how notifications are handled if a fullscreen window is focused. By default it's set to show so notifications are being shown.

Other possible values are delay: Already shown notifications are continued to be displayed until they are dismissed or time out but new notifications will be held back and displayed when the focus to the fullscreen window is lost.

Or pushback which is equivalent to delay with the difference that already existing notifications are paused and hidden until the focus to the fullscreen window is lost.

On wayland, if follow is set to mouse or keyboard, the output where the notification is located cannot be determined. So dunst will delay or pushback if any of the outputs is fullscreen. Since the fullscreen protocol is fairly new, you will need a recent version of a compositor that supports it. At the time of writing, you will need the git version of sway. See also layer to change if notifications appear above fullscreen windows in Wayland.

Default: show

new_icon

Updates the icon of the notification, it should be a path to a valid image.

set_stack_tag

Sets the stack tag for the notification, notifications with the same (non-empty) stack tag and the same appid will replace each-other so only the newest one is visible. This can be useful for example in volume or brightness notifications where you only want one of the same type visible.

The stack tag can be set by the client with the 'synchronous', 'private-synchronous' 'x-canonical-private-synchronous' or the 'x-dunst-stack-tag' hints.

set_transient

Sets whether the notification is considered transient. Transient notifications will bypass the idle_threshold setting.

By default notifications are _not_ considered transient but clients can set the value of this by specifying the 'transient' hint when sending notifications.

set_category

Sets the category of the notification. See https://specifications.freedesktop.org/notification-spec/notification-spec-latest.html#categories for a list of standard categories.

timeout

Equivalent to the timeout setting in the urgency sections.

urgency

This sets the notification urgency.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This currently DOES NOT re-apply the attributes from the urgency_* sections. The changed urgency will only be visible in rules defined later. Use msg_urgency to match it.

skip_display

Setting this to true will prevent the notification from being displayed initially but will be saved in history for later viewing.

history_ignore

Setting this to true will display the notification initially, but stop it from being recalled via the history.

action_name

Sets the name of the action to be invoked on do_action. If not specified, the action set as default action or the only available action will be invoked.

Default: "default"

word_wrap (values: [true/false], default: true)

Specifies whether to wrap the text if the lines get longer than the maximum notification width. If it's set to true, long lines will be broken into multiple lines expanding the notification window height as necessary for them to fit. If the text doesn't fit in the window, it will be ellipsize according to ellipsize.

ellipsize (values: [start/middle/end], default: middle)

Specifies where truncated lines should be ellipsized.

alignment (values: [left/center/right], default: left)

Defines how the text should be aligned within the notification.

As with the filtering attributes, each one corresponds to the respective notification attribute to be modified.

As with filtering, to make a rule modify an attribute simply assign it in the rule definition.

If the format is set to an empty string, the notification will not be suppressed.

SCRIPTING

Within rules you can specify a script to be run every time the rule is matched by assigning the 'script' option to the name of the script to be run.

When the script is called details of the notification that triggered it will be passed via environment variables. The following variables are available: DUNST_APP_NAME, DUNST_SUMMARY, DUNST_BODY, DUNST_ICON_PATH, DUNST_URGENCY, DUNST_ID, DUNST_PROGRESS, DUNST_CATEGORY, DUNST_STACK_TAG, DUNST_URLS, DUNST_TIMEOUT, DUNST_TIMESTAMP, DUNST_DESKTOP_ENTRY, and DUNST_STACK_TAG.

Another, less recommended way to get notifcations details from a script is via command line parameters. These are passed to the script in the following order: appname, summary, body, icon_path, urgency.

Where DUNST_ICON_PATH or icon_path is the absolute path to the icon file if there is one. DUNST_URGENCY or urgency is one of "LOW", "NORMAL" or "CRITICAL". DUNST_URLS is a newline-separated list of urls associated with the notification.

Note that some variables may be empty.

If the notification is suppressed, the script will not be run unless always_run_scripts is set to true.

If '~/' occurs at the beginning of the script parameter, it will get replaced by the users' home directory. If the value is not an absolute path, the directories in the PATH variable will be searched for an executable of the same name.

COLORS

Colors are interpreted as X11 color values. This includes both verbatim color names such as "Yellow", "Blue", "White", etc as well as #RGB and #RRGGBB values.

You may also specify a transparency component in #RGBA or #RRGGBBAA format.

NOTE: '#' is interpreted as a comment, to use it the entire value needs to be in quotes like so: separator_color="#123456"

NOTIFY-SEND

dunst is able to get different colors for a message via notify-send. In order to do that you have to add a hint via the -h option. The progress value can be set with a hint, too.

All hints

See RULES for more detailed explanations for some options.

fgcolor: Foreground cololor
bgcolor: Background color
frcolor: Frame color
hlcolor: Highlight color
value: Progress value.
image-path: Icon name. This may be a path or just the icon name.
image-data: A stream of raw image data.
category: The category.
desktop-entry: The desktop entry.
transient: The transient value.

Examples

notify-send -h string:fgcolor:#ff4444
notify-send -h string:bgcolor:#4444ff -h string:fgcolor:#ff4444 -h string:frcolor:#44ff44
notify-send -h int:value:42 "Working ..."

ACTIONS

Dunst allows notifiers (i.e.: programs that send the notifications) to specify actions. Dunst has support for both displaying indicators for these, and interacting with these actions.

If "show_indicators" is true and a notification has an action, an "(A)" will be prepended to the notification format. Likewise, an "(U)" is prepended to notifications with URLs. It is possible to interact with notifications that have actions regardless of this setting, though it may not be obvious which notifications HAVE actions.

The "context" keybinding is used to interact with these actions, by showing a menu of possible actions. This feature requires "dmenu" or a dmenu drop-in replacement present.

Alternatively, you can invoke an action with a middle click on the notification. If there is exactly one associated action, or one is marked as default, that one is invoked. If there are multiple, the context menu is shown. The same applies to URLs when there are no actions.

TIME FORMAT

A time can be any decimal integer value suffixed with a time unit. If no unit given, seconds ("s") is taken as default.

Time units understood by dunst are "ms", "s", "m", "h" and "d".

Example time: "1000ms" "10m"

AUTHORS

Written by Sascha Kruse <knopwob@googlemail.com>

REPORTING BUGS

Bugs and suggestions should be reported on GitHub at https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst/issues

COPYRIGHT

If you feel that copyrights are violated, please send me an email.

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dunst.5.pod

dunst.5.pod

NAME

DESCRIPTION

Global section

Urgency sections

DUNSTCTL

HISTORY

WAYLAND

RULES

SCRIPTING

COLORS

NOTIFY-SEND

ACTIONS

TIME FORMAT

AUTHORS

REPORTING BUGS

COPYRIGHT

SEE ALSO

Files

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dunst.5.pod

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NAME

DESCRIPTION

Global section

Urgency sections

DUNSTCTL

HISTORY

WAYLAND

RULES

SCRIPTING

COLORS

NOTIFY-SEND

ACTIONS

TIME FORMAT

AUTHORS

REPORTING BUGS

COPYRIGHT

SEE ALSO