xueify

A small, good-looking notification daemon for Wayland, written in C.

xueify shows desktop notifications as dark rounded cards in the bottom-right corner of the screen. It's designed to cost nothing while idle: no timers, no polling and no buffers until a notification arrives.

Features

• Spec-compliant: implements the Desktop Notifications Specification 1.2, so notify-send, browsers, chat apps and anything using libnotify just work.
• Cover art and icons: image-data, image-path and app_icon are cropped to a rounded square; notifications without an image get a bell.
• Readable text: a one-line title and up to two lines of body, with <b>, <i> and <u> markup and a plain-text fallback.
• Stacking: up to five cards at once, newest at the bottom; the rest wait in a queue.
• In-place updates: replaces_id and the x-canonical-private-synchronous / x-dunst-stack-tag hints update an existing card instead of adding one, which is ideal for volume and brightness popups.
• Mouse: hover pauses the timeout; left click runs the default action, right click dismisses and middle click clears everything.
• Critical notifications get an accent border and stay until dismissed.
• HiDPI: renders at the scale the compositor prefers.

Resource use

Measured on Arch Linux with Hyprland, x86-64:

Binary size	~80 KB
Private memory while idle	~5 MB (PSS ~7 MB; the rest is shared libraries)
Wakeups while idle	0. The process sleeps in a single poll()
CPU per notification	One draw. Slide animations are left to the compositor

Each card is drawn once into a shared-memory buffer, which is unmapped straight away and released when the compositor is done with it.

Requirements

• A Wayland compositor with zwlr_layer_shell_v1: Hyprland, Sway, river, niri, labwc, Wayfire and others.
• Runtime: wayland, cairo, pango, gdk-pixbuf2, glib2, libsystemd (sd-bus).
• Build: a C11 compiler, make, pkg-config, wayland-scanner, wayland-protocols, wlr-protocols.
• Optional: librsvg for SVG icons, and the Adwaita Sans font (adwaita-fonts) for the intended look. Any other font works too.

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel wayland wayland-protocols wlr-protocols cairo pango gdk-pixbuf2

Installation

Arch Linux

A PKGBUILD lives in packaging/arch:

git clone https://github.com/ouxan/xueify.git
cd xueify/packaging/arch
makepkg -si

From source

git clone https://github.com/ouxan/xueify.git
cd xueify
make
sudo make install                  # into /usr/local
# or, without root:
make install PREFIX="$HOME/.local"

This installs the binary, a D-Bus activation file, a systemd user unit (xueify.service) and the xueify(1) man page. make uninstall with the same PREFIX removes them again.

Running

Only one notification daemon can own org.freedesktop.Notifications, so stop the one you use now (dunst, mako, swaync, …) first.

Start it with your session. Add this to your compositor's autostart:

systemctl --user start xueify.service

If your session activates graphical-session.target (for example through uwsm), you can run systemctl --user enable xueify.service instead.

The unit restarts xueify if it ever crashes. On top of that, the D-Bus activation file starts xueify on demand when the first notification is sent.

Note: dbus-broker only reads activation files at startup. After installing, run busctl --user call org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus ReloadConfig or log out and back in. When another daemon also ships an activation file, the one in the earlier data directory wins (~/.local/share comes before /usr/local/share, which comes before /usr/share).

Hyprland

Layer surfaces use the namespace xueify. To make cards slide in from the right, add a layer rule. With the Lua configuration:

hl.layer_rule({
    name      = "xueify",
    match     = { namespace = "^xueify$" },
    animation = "slide right",
})

Trying it out

notify-send "Hello" "This is <b>xueify</b>"
notify-send -i firefox "Download finished" "archive.tar.zst"
notify-send -u critical "Low battery" "5% remaining"
notify-send -h string:image-path:/path/to/cover.png "Song title" "Artist"
notify-send -A default=Open "Click me" "Left click runs the default action"

# Update a card in place
id=$(notify-send -p "Volume" "10%"); notify-send -r "$id" "Volume" "60%"

Customisation

xueify has no configuration file. Size, spacing, colours, font, timeout and the number of visible cards are compile-time constants at the top of src/xueify.h. Edit them and run make install again.

ICON_RULES in the same file swaps the sender's icon when the app name or the summary starts with a given prefix. The replacement can be a file path, a themed icon name or a built-in drawing. Images sent with the notification still take precedence. The default rule draws Claude Code's pixel mascot (@clawd) for notifications from Claude Code, which usually arrive through the terminal with the terminal's own icon.

make preview renders sample cards with the real drawing code into docs/preview.png, so you can check a change without sending notifications.

Specification coverage

Capabilities	body, body-markup, actions, icon-static
Hints	urgency, image-data / image_data / icon_data, image-path / image_path, x-canonical-private-synchronous, synchronous, x-dunst-stack-tag
Actions	default is invoked on left click; other actions are accepted but not shown as buttons
Close reasons	expired (1), dismissed (2), CloseNotification (3)
Timeout	the sender's value; -1 means 5 s; 0 and critical urgency mean never

Project layout

src/main.c      event loop: Wayland, D-Bus and one timerfd in poll()
src/dbus.c      org.freedesktop.Notifications server (sd-bus)
src/wl.c        layer-shell surfaces, shm buffers, pointer input
src/render.c    card drawing with cairo and pango, image loading
src/notif.c     notification list, stacking, timeouts
tools/preview.c renders docs/preview.png
data/           D-Bus activation file and systemd user unit templates
docs/           man page and preview image

License

MIT. The placeholder bell is traced from Lucide (ISC); see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.