Excellent Utilities is a series of cornerstone articles highlighting essential utilities. These are small, indispensable tools, useful for anyone running a Linux machine.
Do you ever run a command from a terminal and forget to check when it’s completed or continually monitor the window for completion? Maybe you need noti. It’s a small utility written in Go that monitors a command or process and triggers a notification.
By default, noti triggers a banner notification when a command has been completed. But it can also trigger notifications for Mattermost, Telegram, Zulip, GCHat, and others. Messages can be received on your computer or phone.
Installation
We tested noti with Manjaro, an Arch-based distro. There’s a package in the Arch User Repository, which is built with the command:
$ yay -S noti
We also tested building the software from its source code. Clone the project’s GitHub repository and change into the newly created directory with the command:
$ git clone https://github.com/variadico/noti && cd noti
Build the source code and install the executable with the command:
$ make build && make install
noti lets you trigger speech notifications using the -s flag. We need to install espeak. On a Manjaro distro, we issue the command
$ yay -S espeak-ng
However, on our systems, using the -s flag doesn’t work with noti complaining that
Error: The specified espeak-ng voice does not exist.
A simple solution is to install the espeak package from the AUR.
$ yay -S espeak
To change the voice, you can create a configuration file which is in the YAML format and named noti.yaml. If not explicitly set with the --file flag, noti checks the following paths, in the following order.
./.noti.yaml
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/noti/noti.yaml
You’ll want a configuration file if you want to use the various services that noti supports such as Slack, Telegram, Zulip and Twilio.
It’s also possible to use environment variables. For speech the environment variable is called NOTI_ESPEAK_VOICENAME.
For example, to have a female voice:
$ export NOTI_ESPEAK_VOICENAME=f1
In the next page, we’ll take you through noti and give our verdict.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation / Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| AES Crypt | Encrypt files using the Advanced Encryption Standard |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| broot | Next gen tree explorer and customizable launcher |
| Cerebro | Fast application launcher |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| CopyQ | Advanced clipboard manager |
| croc | Securely transfer files and folders from the command-line |
| Deskreen | Live streaming your desktop to a web browser |
| duf | Disk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic df |
| eza | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| Extension Manager | Browse, install and manage GNOME Shell Extensions |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| horcrux | File splitter with encryption and redundancy |
| Kooha | Simple screen recorder |
| KOReader | Document viewer for a wide variety of file formats |
| Imagine | A simple yet effective image optimization tool |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| lsd | Like exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to ls |
| Mark Text | Simple and elegant Markdown editor |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| navi | Interactive cheatsheet tool |
| noti | Monitors a command or process and triggers a notification |
| Nushell | Flexible cross-platform shell with a modern feel |
| nvitop | GPU process management for NVIDIA graphics cards |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Oh My Zsh | Framework to manage your Zsh configuration |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| pastel | Generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors |
| PDF Mix Tool | Perform common editing operations on PDF files |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| Rnote | Sketch and take handwritten notes |
| scrcpy | Display and control Android devices |
| Sticky | Simulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop |
| tldr | Simplified and community-driven man pages |
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| Whoogle Search | Self-hosted and privacy-focused metasearch engine |
| Zellij | Terminal workspace with batteries included |