Fixing Gnome Notification’s Popup Location

Posted on December 1, 2008 by Michael Schurter

Gnome notifications popup in the lower left corner of your desktop by default* which constantly annoys me. I usually have a terminal open in the lower left corner, and having my work covered by notifications is quite annoying.

Luckily the fix is easy:

  1. Open Applications > System Tools > Configuration Editor**
  2. Navigate to apps > notification-daemon
  3. Edit the popup_location to be something less annoying. I prefer top_right.
  4. Close Configuration Editor. Changes will take effect next time you login or just restart the notification-daemon: 
    ~$ killall notification-daemon
~$ /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon &

Note that the notifications will actually show up over the top of your panel which seems a bit strange. However, I’d rather the notification covered the panel than take up any more precious application space than is necessary.

Luckily you can easily test notifications if you have Python and python-notify installed:

>>> import pynotify
>>> pynotify.init('foo')
True
>>> pynotify.Notification('foo', 'bar').show()
True

Notification in the upper right.

* at least on Gnome 2.22.3 on Debian Sid with notification-daemon 0.3.7-1+b1
** aka gconf-editor from the gconf-editor package which should be installed with Gnome.

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  • Ravana

    Excellent tip!, Thanks!

  • http://cupcakecarnival.net John Brier

    Hi, thanks for this post! It worked great here on Fedora 14, however I didn’t have to kill notification-daemon for the changes to take effect. I’m not sure if why this is, dbus is in use now?

    Also, I tested with ‘notify-send hi’ instead of writing the python script.

    [john@farina ~]$ notify-send hi
[john@farina ~]$ rpm -qf `which notify-send`
libnotify-0.5.1-1.fc14.x86_64

    Thanks again.

  • http://ppalma.cl ppalma

    Ty, helpful tip.