Change Notification Systems

Regolith ships with a notification system called Rofication. It is designed to work in the background and not use pop-ups as a way of alerting the user to a new notification. Rather, a bar item displays the current number of unread notifications and a dialog, opened with super n, lists the current notifications. This page describes a way to install an alternative notification system which works in a more traditional way.

We will use dunst as an example, because it works in both the X11 (i3) and the Wayland (sway) session. Similar steps can be used with other notification components; see Other Notification Daemons below.

1. Replace Rofication with dunst:

   sudo apt install dunst libnotify-bin

   dunst conflicts with Rofication, so apt also removes regolith-rofication and regolith-wm-rofication-ilia, the package that starts Rofication and binds super n to its dialog. If you want to remove the remaining configuration, the following works as well:

   sudo apt purge regolith-rofication # remove any remaining config as well

2. Log out and back in.

3. Test your notifications with notify-send test123. You should see a pop-up notification from dunst.

D-Bus starts dunst when the first notification arrives. To configure it, see man dunst and man 5 dunst; your own settings go in ~/.config/dunst/dunstrc.

Sway: Notification Count in the Bar

In the Wayland session, after Rofication is removed, the bar can show a red Failed to connect to socket where the notification count was. Until your i3status-rs package hides this block by itself, use your own copy of the bar configuration without it:

1. Copy the default configuration:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust
   cp /etc/regolith/i3status-rust/config.toml ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml

2. In the copy, delete the [[block]] entry with block = "rofication" and the [[block.click]] lines that follow it.

3. Tell the bar to use your copy, and reload:

   echo "wm.bar.status_config: ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml" >> ~/.config/regolith3/Xresources
   regolith-look refresh

Other Notification Daemons

mako and SwayNotificationCenter don’t conflict with Rofication, so apt leaves it installed, and Rofication keeps receiving the notifications. Remove it yourself:

sudo apt remove regolith-rofication regolith-wm-rofication-ilia

Both only run in the Wayland session. If one of them is your only notification daemon, the X11 session shows no notifications.

Going Back to Rofication

sudo apt install regolith-rofication regolith-wm-rofication-ilia

This removes dunst. Log out and back in.