Dunst: Add option to align icon/text vertically

[chronus7]

In it's current state (v1.3.0), dunst seems to vertically center the icon and text. I personally find this irritating and would prefer to align them to the top of the notification.

The following graphics demonstrate/clarify the idea with a) an icon smaller than the text and b) a much larger icon than the text.

Center alignment (current behaviour)
┌───────────────────┐  |  ┌───────────────────┐
│      first line   │  |  │ ####              │
│  #   second       │  |  │ ####  one line    │
│      third line   │  |  │ ####              │
└───────────────────┘  |  └───────────────────┘

Top alignment
┌───────────────────┐  |  ┌───────────────────┐
│  #   first line   │  |  │ ####  one line    │
│      second       │  |  │ ####              │
│      third line   │  |  │ ####              │
└───────────────────┘  |  └───────────────────┘

Bottom alignment
┌───────────────────┐  |  ┌───────────────────┐
│      first line   │  |  │ ####              │
│      second       │  |  │ ####              │
│  #   third line   │  |  │ ####  one line    │
└───────────────────┘  |  └───────────────────┘

Would it be possible to implement such alignment? I would much appreciate it.

[Nagayoshi-dev]

Agreed, I can totally understand why people would be driven nuts by a limitation in the current release like this. For future readers who are looking for a solution to this problem, here's a workaround hack you can use. Basically, what you do is trick dunst into preserving the leading/trailing whitespace in your string by using a "pseudo" space character. This way, you can vertically top-align or bottom-align your notification text.

Before the hack:

notify-send "🎵 ~Now playing~ 🎵" "$SONG_TITLE\n$ALBUM_NAME"

After the hack:

# NOTE!!! The "space" at the end is actually the Unicode symbol '\u3000'
notify-send "🎵 ~Now playing~ 🎵" "$SONG_TITLE\n$ALBUM_NAME\n\n\n　"

Good luck! Here's a video demo of it in action

[kushraj]

Hi, is there any possibility this will be taken up any time soon ?
been really looking forward to this since a while..

[tsipinakis]

Unfortunately, I do not have enough time to dedicate to proper dunst development other than bugfixing for the time being. However if anyone wants to step up to implement this I'd gladly accept a PR, and I'm obviously still active here if there are any questions.

Most of the positioning work is done in render_content so if anyone wants to implement it that's the place to start.

[chronus7]

Most of the positioning work is done in render_content so if anyone wants to implement it that's the place to start.

Uh, this looks intriguing. I hacked at it shortly and it looks promising. Will try to have another shot at it on the weekend. Thanks for the pointer :)

[tsipinakis]

Implemented with #684!