uNote is very simple and flexible standalone GUI notification utility.

It is not affiliated with any of window managers. It provides network interface to accept messages. It makes it possible to receive messages from different scripts, even from other hosts. And it makes very easy to raise notifications from routines like cron and at without care about $DISPLAY and Xauth.

uNote is written on Tcl/Tk and does not require any additional libraries.

uNote supports multiply windows and can display two types of messages: text and progress bar.

uNote is one file (script). Just run it.

To run it automatically add it to ~/.xinitrc.

Simplest:

echo '|Hello, world!' | nc localhost 7779

Big red label at specified place, displayed for 10 seconds:

echo 'geometry=+10+10,fg=f00,bg=ff0,size=24,padx=120,duration=10|Hello, world!' | nc localhost 7779

Green 80% bar:

echo 'type=bar,geometry=+10+10,percent=80,width=200,height=10,duration=10,fg=0f0,bg=000,bd=090|' | nc localhost 7779

Message consists of two parts, separated by pipe ("|"). First (left) part contains options, second (right) part is a message itself.

So, simplest text message is "|OK":

echo '|OK' | nc localhost 7779

Params are:

• type: text or bar (default text)
• geometry: position in X-format like +0+0, -10-0 etc.
• duration: seconds
• service: name of queues (see below)
• fg: foreground color
• bg: background color
• bd: border color
• tc: percent text color (for progress bar)
• padx: horizontal padding
• pady: vertical padding
• size: font size
• family: font family like Droid Serif (command fc-list : family show all font families on your X)
• bold: bold flag
• justify: text justification (left, right, center)
• percent: percents (for progress bar)

For every unique geometry value raise its own window.

Every window has its own message queue and displays only one message form top of queue.

New message is appended to queue, and replaces existence with same value of service. If service not specified, it will be generated by random number generator.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Socket;

my $message = 'DONE!';

my $host = 'localhost';
my $port = 7779;
socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, (getprotobyname('tcp'))[2]);
connect(SOCK, sockaddr_in($port, inet_aton($host)));
send(
    SOCK,
    'geometry=+0+10,bg=99f,fg=000,size=24,padx=12,duration=10,family=Ubuntu Condensed|' .
    $message,
    0
);

#!/usr/bin/python

import socket

HOST = 'localhost'
PORT = 7779

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((HOST, PORT))
s.sendall(b'|Hello, world')
s.close()

Script to send message with two possible color schemes.

#!/bin/sh

sets='service=remote,duration=20,bg=#224,fg=#99f,size=40,padx=30,family=Ubuntu,geometry=+700-0'

if test "a$#" = 'a2'
then
  if test "a$1" = 'a--small-green'
  then
    sets='service=remote,duration=20,bg=#222,fg=#0f0,size=14,padx=10,family=Ubuntu,geometry=+200+0'
  else
    echo "Ignore option $1"
  fi
  shift
fi

mess=$1
if test -z "$mess"
then
  mess="`uname -n`: Complete"
fi

echo -n "$sets|$mess" |
nc localhost 7779

You can add to your ~/.ssh/config:

RemoteForward 7779 localhost:7779