sxalert: scriptable, customizable, daemonless notifications 
============================================================
Author: Michail Konstantinos Dimopoulos
Date: 2026-10-15
Site: https://mcdim.xyz


   Three or so years ago I decided to write a simple notification
   tool in C so that I could easily script my notifications in
   Shell. After all this time of personal exclusive use, and a
   good refurbishment, I believe sxalert is ready for public use.
   Today I release version 1.0 of the tool!
   [1]sxalert

   sxalert is a GPLv3+ licensed minimal alert utility for X11 that
   supports freetype scalable fonts, utf-8 text, runtime
   customization of colors and border-width, multiple monitors and
   concurrent notification serialization. And all of this in a C
   file with less than 400 CLOC and very few dependencies! (though
   [2]herbe beats me in that regard)
   [3]sxalert examples

   But perhaps most importantly, sxalert is scriptable. It accepts
   text from both command-line arguments and standard input. In
   fact, it can combine both sources so that the command-line
   argument text is appended to stdin text. This makes it great
   for displaying ASCII art banners directly from files with
   custom text added below. Moreover, mouse clicks result in
   distinct exit statuses (0 for left click, 1 for middle, 2 for
   right, and 3 incase of a timeout). This means that it can
   launch software, act as a dialogue box, and automate all sorts
   of tasks just based on your mouse input!

   A few examples
   --------------

   Print a low-battery warning:

[ "$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity)" -lt 15 ] && sxalert "Ba
ttery below 15%"

   Tell you if your build failed or not:

make && sxalert -t 55ff55 "Build successful" || sxalert -t ff5555 "Build
 failed"

   Email notification that can launch neomutt in st:

sxalert -d 10000 "You have new mail" "Left click to read"; [ $? -eq 0 ]
&& st -e neomutt

  and so much more:

cowsay you suck | sxalert -s

   Customizability
   ---------------

   sxalert allows for the runtime customization of text color,
   background color, border color and border width. You can
   configure duration in milliseconds (with values <= 0 being
   indefinite). From the config.h file, you can configure text
   height, font, position, size limitations and defaults for the
   colors and border width.

  Any limitations?

   Yes, sxalert doesn't support font-fallback, though this is
   planned for some time in the future. Likewise, it doesn't
   support markup or images and never will.

  How to install

   You can get the official v1.0 release tarball from [4]here.
   Alternatively, you can clone the [5]repository directly. I'll
   show you the former way:

$ wget https://mcdim.xyz/library/dist/sxalert-1.0.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf sxalert-1.0.tar.gz
$ cd sxalert-1.0/

   There you can configure config.h as you like, and install with:

$ make
$ sudo make install

   Consult on the manpage on usage!

   Extras
   ------

  Xresources patch

   I also wrote a small patch for those who want their default
   notifications to be based on their xresources file. Apply it
   like so while in the project directory, ideally before editing
   any configuration code:

$ wget https://mcdim.xyz/library/dist/patches/sxalert-1.0-xresources.dif
f
$ patch < sxalert-1.0-xresources.diff

  D-Bus daemon: Tiramisu integration

   sxalert is easily integrated with the drawer-agnostic D-Bus
   daemon [6]tiramisu. Simply install tiramisu and run this as a
   daemon script or directly in your .xinitrc:

tiramisu -o '#summary' | while IFS= read -r message; do
        sxalert -d 3000 "$message" </dev/null
done

  Optional daemon hack

   Back in 2023 I haphazardly hacked together a script called
   sxalertd that is essentially a pseudo daemon that intercepts
   D-Bus messages and uses sxalert to display them as
   notifications. It has worked fine for 3 years for me, and I've
   only used sxalert during this time. You can clone it from
   [7]the repo.

  Contributions

   If you have any issues, or want to contribute patches, email
   <hackers@mcdim.xyz>. The repository on GitHub is a read-only
   mirror.

   Enjoy!
   ------

References

   1. file:///tmp/lynxXXXXkcnJii/sxalertlogo.png
   2. https://github.com/dudik/herbe
   3. file:///tmp/lynxXXXXkcnJii/sxalerts.png
   4. https://mcdim.xyz/library/dist/
   5. https://mcdim.xyz/git/sxalert/log.html
   6. https://112.cachefly.net/Sweets/tiramisu
   7. https://mcdim.xyz/git/sxalertd/log.html