I’ve decided to post here since I could not for the life of me find an answer. Pardon if this isn’t the right place to do it; no other categories seemed to fit. My system is Manjaro Stable and I’ve got the Cinnamon desktop.
Constant notifications from my Email and Discord are extremely distracting to me. But I also don’t want to just turn them off, since I rely on them to remind me to check them, and manually pausing them is also unsatisfactory: If paused permanently, I’ll constantly forget to turn them on again, and pausing for a set amount of time is suboptimal since my workflow is frequently so variable that I can’t accurately determine when I’ll be able to check and answer my incoming communications next; I could pause them for an hour each time, but having to refresh this manually every time is a pain and another distraction I’d like to avoid. Plus, I’d rather not pause all notifications, just the ones from my communication programs.
What I want is to receive scheduled notifications (at boot and either at set times during the day or after set amounts of time after booting; I haven’t decided yet) informing me if and only if I’ve received new messages or some other thing happened that the program wants to inform me about. I’d also be very happy with such a notification that only tests if the program tried to send me a notification during the past set amount of time, not tracking what exactly that notification said.
Essentially, instead of notifications constantly popping up from Thunderbird and Discord, I would like to only receive a notification say, once an hour, informing me that there’s new stuff in Thunderbird and Discord for me to look at. A meta-notification telling me that these tried to send me notifications, if you will.
I thought this would be a standard option in Preferences or Settings, but I couldn’t find anything. The programs themselves also don’t seem to have this functionality. I read through the entirety of Dunst in the hope that there might be a setting or combination of rules that could let me do this, but unless I’m missing something, there doesn’t seem to be.
So… is there any way to do this? I would really like there to be, since it was a potential highlight of me switching from Windows to Linux.
No ready solution comes to my mind. It will probably have to be manually created.
For the timing part, it can definitely be done with systemd timers and services.
Trickier will be the notification part/script. I have no knowledge of cinnamon. I use xfce. Here is how it would go on xfce: The notifications go through notifyd. There is a setting in the notification control panel to log everything, or to log apps that are blocked from showing notifications, which will be your case (you turn off the notifications for the app and redirect them to log).
The log itself is a sqllite database stored in ~/.cache/xfce4/notifyd/ if logging is enabled.
So i would need a script that reads database, check and converts the timestamps and filters and shows entries from particular time period for particular app. And then shows its own custom notification (with dunst, notifyd-send, yad, whatever).
So i would say your first task is to enable and check where the notification log is stored and if it logs on dnd.
My personal way of handling this is to only open my mail when I have time to answer.
Perhaps taking the applications offline?
Only open them when you have scheduled time to deal with the content?
I remember an application I tried a long time ago - mailnag - it does not fetch your mail - it pokes the mailbox at configured intervals - and create a notification - either using sound or silently.
Darn, I was afraid of that. Well, that’s a little outside of my current competence at the moment, but knowing me it was probably inevitable that I’d eventually start writing quality-of-life scripts for myself when nothing already existing fit the bill. I just didn’t expect the need to arise so soon after switching. Thank you graciously for the tutorial, I’m sure it will come in very useful when I get round to trying something like this.
Unfortunately, with my AuDHD brain, out-of-sight means out-of-mind. In order to open them when I have scheduled time means remembering that I need to check them when I have scheduled time. I heavily rely on reminders on my various devices in order to function. And unfortunately I can’t just have an hourly reminder to go look since anything that constant, consistent and non-new-information bearing will just get tuned out in time.
I didn’t choose this brain, but it’s the one I have to work with.
Mailnag seems like at least a partial potential solution; I’ll look into it, thank you.
Shame Discord seems stubbornly unwilling to let anything like this work.
I probably need a more in-your.face notification if I’m not to miss it, so I’ll have a look at birdtray to see if that might provide an option to do that. Thank you.
Welp, at least there’s some gratification in knowing I’m not the only one stumped in getting Discord to do this.
Use the system notification
Show an alert
