many faces of cmus-notify

I've been using this small utility cmus-notify on two of my computers — it displays pretty notifications with what cmus is playing. I've tried few others, but ended up using this one in Rust as it did everything I wanted it to with no configuration required — never had issues with it ever since.

I have this old Thinkpad T43 also running Void — same as other two laptops, it uses Xorg instead of Wayland as its video chip is really old, but all other software is mostly the same.

And I started using it more or less every day now — like I said, this laptop is really old so I have to avoid running software that is heavy on resources, e.g. it can run Firefox just fine, but you have to steer clear of what we call modern web if you want to still have some RAM left. I use TUI software a lot even on more powerful machines so it's not a problem for me, not even being able to do the heavylifting feels somewhat refreshing.

Anyway, I have cmus on this machine — same as on others and I have access to my vast collection of music over the network, so why not have these notifications too? In X11 environment I use the excellent Dunst ( https://dunst-project.org ) utility to handle them, but the way other software requests displaying them through DBus is standardized — so it shouldn't be a problem, right?

Both computers that had cmus-notify were off and I was too lazy to turn either on just to grab the source off them. Why don't I just make a new clone of remote repo to build it? Or, rather, if it's in Rust… Why don't I use the power of crates.io.

So I do the "cargo install cmus-notify" — it downloads the dependencies, builds them, build cmus-notify itself — exactly like it should. It gets placed in ~/.cargo/bin — which sure is in my PATH.

I switch to cmus to test it, do ":set status_display_program=cmus-notify", switch to a different song and… nothing happens, another song — nothing! Hmmm…

How about just running it to make sure it doesn't just crash? I do this and as far as I remember on my other computers it displayed a notification with the name of the song currently playing when run without parameters.

https://github.com/mathieu-lemay/cmus-notify

The many faces of cmus-notify was published on 2024-02-03

🔙 Back