A notification server in Python

I decided to learn Python two days ago. Partly because I wanted a quick solution to a problem (and writing C always takes me so long), but also because I’ve read a lot of positive comments about it.

The problem

What I wanted was to get rid of the old gnome-osd stuff and beautify the visual output of some shortcut-scripts I use (more about that later). I found out I needed a script that can display notifications (using Ubuntu’s notify-osd) and provide that functionality for other scripts with D-Bus.

“D-Bus?”, you might ask. Well, I also wanted to be able to update notifications or append new body-text to them. This turned out to only be possible for a single script, but my shortcut-scripts (like “toggle-touchpad”) run only once and then exit. So I needed inter-process-communication, hence D-Bus.

The solution

Python is indeed great, because there are bindings for python-dbus and pynotify. Just what I needed to start hacking.

Download: Notification Server, 0.0.1

Usage

Here’s an example (toggle-touchpad), of how to use “send-notification.py”:

#!/bin/bash

TEST=`synclient -l | grep "TouchpadOff             = 0"`

if [ "$TEST" != "" ]; then
    synclient TouchpadOff=1
    send-notification.py --name="toggle-touchpad" \
        --icon="input-mouse" "Input" "Touchpad disabled"
else
    synclient TouchpadOff=0
    send-notification.py --name="toggle-touchpad" \
        --icon="input-mouse" "Input" "Touchpad enabled"
fi

Both Python-scripts come with “--help“, by the way.

  1. Tom Derks
    January 1, 2011, 16:21
    #!/bin/bash TEST=`synclient -l | grep "TouchpadOff = 0"` I had to motdify the shellscript a bit to get it running. I had to tell the system to use python for the .py scrips. thus i ended with this: if [ "$TEST" != "" ]; then synclient TouchpadOff=1 python send-notification.py --name="toggle-touchpad" \ --icon="input-mouse" "Input" "Touchpad disabled" else synclient TouchpadOff=0 python send-notification.py --name="toggle-touchpad" \ --icon="input-mouse" "Input" "Touchpad enabled" fi
    Reply
  2. Tom Derks
    January 1, 2011, 16:23
    I had to modify the shellscript a bit to get it running. I had to tell the system to use python for the .py scrips. Thus i ended with this: #!/bin/bash TEST=`synclient -l | grep "TouchpadOff = 0"` I had to motdify the shellscript a bit to get it running. I had to tell the system to use python for the .py scrips. thus i ended with this: if [ "$TEST" != "" ]; then synclient TouchpadOff=1 python send-notification.py --name="toggle-touchpad" \ --icon="input-mouse" "Input" "Touchpad disabled" else synclient TouchpadOff=0 python send-notification.py --name="toggle-touchpad" \ --icon="input-mouse" "Input" "Touchpad enabled" fi
    Reply

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