Native Windows Notifications for WSL

notify-send doesn't work on WSL. WSLNotify.exe may be used instead. You can grab it from the latest release.

Legal Notice

'WSL' stands for 'Windows Subsystem for Linux'. This project is not developed or endorsed by Microsoft. It is mainly inspired by stuartleeks/wsl-notify-send.

Usage

The following commands were run in Bash on Windows Terminal after navigating to the directory containing WSLNotify.exe. (If you use Windows Command Prompt, type WSLNotify instead of ./WSLNotify.exe while entering these commands.)

./WSLNotify.exe "Summary Goes Here"

./WSLNotify.exe "Summary Goes Here" "Body goes here"

./WSLNotify.exe -i "dialog-information" "Good News" "Something good happened"

./WSLNotify.exe -i "dialog-warning" "News" "Something happened"

./WSLNotify.exe -i "dialog-error" "Bad News" "Something bad happened"

As of now, only the -i option is supported, and only for the three stock icons seen above. Support for the -u (for urgency) and -t (for expire time) options may never be added, because Windows notification display times are based on system accessibility settings.

Use Case

I created this package so that my command timer would also work on WSL. On GNU/Linux, if you add the following to ~/.bashrc (or perhaps ~/.bash_aliases):

before_command ()
{
    [ -z "${__busy+.}" ] && __busy=1
}

after_command ()
{
    unset __busy
    notify-send "Command Complete"
}

trap before_command DEBUG
PROMPT_COMMAND=after_command

you will get a notification every time a terminal command gets completed. With a little more work, you can make it so that the notification reports the elapsed time if the terminal is not the currently active window. To emulate the same behaviour on WSL (which behaves like a headless system, whereby notifications and active windows are meaningless), Windows notifications and Windows window IDs can be used. With a few tricks (using WSLNotify.exe and WSLGetActiveWindow.exe, as seen in dotfiles/.bash_aliases), the timer works seamlessly on GNU/Linux and WSL both.

Known Bugs

• Hovering the mouse over the system tray icon after the application has returned makes the notification disappear.
• Multiple notifications fill up the system tray with the application icon.
• The -i option does not work on Windows 11.

Environment-Agnostic Configuration Files

I am also using this repository to store my dotfiles; the ones for Bash, Zsh and GVIM can be used on GNU/Linux or WSL without making any changes whatsoever. Having identical files for both means I don't have to spend time setting up my environment.

There are a few nifty hacks implemented.

Command Timer

As mentioned above. If the terminal in which a command was executed is not the active window when the execution is complete, a notification is sent.

Python Executor

Run Python programs without writing a new file.

LaTeX Renderer

Render mathematical expressions written in a small subset of LaTeX (the subset supported by Matplotlib) alongside the code. Basically, a crude version of Overleaf.