Solaar: Any way to disable notifications?

[cmeeren]

Is there any way to disable notifications from Solaar? I don't need it to notify me that my keyboard has been turned on or whatever. :)

[towo]

It's pretty annoying having this pop up all the time and not disappear just because my MX Master does power saving.

[Lekensteyn]

Btw, is this still an issue with the latest git version? There have been so many changes, could you give it a go?

[cmeeren]

Yes, I still receive a notification each time the device is powered on.

[J-8]

An unprofessional and temporary solution:

Replace

n.show()

with

if(reason != _("powered on")):
    n.show()

on line 130 (older version) or 141 (in the current master repo) in file notify.py. For me the file was in /usr/share/solaar/lib/solaar/ui.

Other important notifications such as battery status are still shown.

[cmeeren]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. Is there any chance this could be added as a configuration option in Solaar?

[jrbenito]

@cmeeren ,

I can try to implement it but do not expect it for any time soon. I am busy these days. Let this ticket open and I will try tackle it.

As always: help wanted

[nm-f]

@jrbenito would you be able to point me to where you create the menu add buttons etc so I can add a checkbox to disable the power notifications via pull request?

[eoghanmurray]

Re. checkboxes; always the best UI is no UI.
I'm struggling to think of valid uses for positive notifications e.g. 'powered on', 'battery full' etc.
Battery percentage is available when you open the Solaar popup (selecting 'Unifying Receiver' from the dropdown), so in the contrived scenario that someone is waiting til their keyboard battery gets to 100% in order to e.g. close their laptop, then I don't think it's too much to ask that they periodically check there.
The only notifications which should interrupt a user (and all notifications are intrusive) is if an in-use peripheral gets to < 10% power, and action is required from user to fix the situation.

Instead of a checkbox, how about just disabling all non-critical notifications?
A related enhancement would be to put the battery percentage or indicator beside the device item in the dropdown.

[SecT0uch]

What about this issue ? Looking forward to this feature.

[melihozbek]

I second that. There's no reason for me to know that my mouse is turned on. At least there should be a way to turn these off.

[tmathews]

This is super annoying.

[FFY00]

Feel free to draft a PR with the necessary changes.

[mainplusuk]

This is driving me crazy. Please let's have the enhancement soon.

[FFY00]

Patches are welcome.

[pfps]

Notifications were turned off in Solaar due to problems in an old version of Fedora. They are turned on again in the current version of Solaar in this repository.
That said, notifications might be too intrusive in some cases. Does anyone have suggestions on which notifications to not show?

[pfps]

Most window mangers can turn off notifications on a per-application basis.
In XFCE this is in main menu, Settings, Notifications.
Then click on Applications and turn off the switch for Solaar.

[pfps]

Closing because desktop environments should have a way to turn off notifications on a per-application basis. XFCE has this feature so full-featured desktop environments should also.

[kauffman214]

Notifications were turned off in Solaar due to problems in an old version of Fedora. They are turned on again in the current version of Solaar in this repository.
That said, notifications might be too intrusive in some cases. Does anyone have suggestions on which notifications to not show?

As I read the intent of the thread, the conversation clarified that they were looking for a way to filter out certain types of messages vs completely disable them. Some would be more important than others like Low Battery vs. Device returning from power save.

[pfps]

If there is consensus on which notifications are just too much, and should never be shown, then it would be easy to get rid of these.
Solaar already makes some notifications low priority - it would be nice if desktop environments could filter on that.
If, however, there has to be a flag that determines which notifications to show then that's a much larger implementation burden.

[kauffman214]

If there is consensus on which notifications are just too much, and should never be shown, then it would be easy to get rid of these.
Solaar already makes some notifications low priority - it would be nice if desktop environments could filter on that.
If, however, there has to be a flag that determines which notifications to show then that's a much larger implementation burden.

That is a good question, and it Would be nice if the filters were in the desktop environment. I could see them 1) grouping them into types and for those with progressive values like battery power 2) having the ability to set a personal threshold for an alert type. So one person may want to know when a battery level hits below 20% and someone else may want to know at 50%. That said... clearly low priority and the notification is more of an annoyance on device wake ups. It'd be nice just to toggle that alert and I would be happy. But you are writing for a large community not one person. :) So I get it. I will look at the code to see if I can make it "work for me" in the meantime. Thanks for all the work you do on this!

[Klap-in]

Most people in this issue mentioned the ‘powered on’ notification as annoying.

What is the purpose of this message? I know it is at least triggered if the mouse/keyboard is waked up from the power saving state (for my keyboard this happens often). Are there setups were the meaning is different or have more meaning? (Are there setups that do not power saving?) is the first time it is powered on useful enough for anyone to be notified?

I think, most people will have already a look in Solaar if their device does not power on. So then this message is also not helping because it could of course not tell something is yet disabled. Btw, the fact that your mouse or keyboard is already responding if moved or typed is even quicker way of notifying that it is available. Therefore no formal notification is actually needed.

So my impression is that this ‘powered on’ message can be safely removed without loss of information. At least for mouses and keyboard.

[kauffman214]

Klap - personally that is the one message I'm looking to get rid of. If there are people that prefer to have it, it would need to be a toggle. When my MX Keyboard and MX Master 3 wake they both throw that notification. Given all the work they have planned with the daemon and UI, I'm just looking to make the hack change mentioned in thread until it changes.

[kauffman214]

An unprofessional and temporary solution:

Replace

n.show()

with

if(reason != _("powered on")):
    n.show()

on line 130 (older version) or 141 (in the current master repo) in file notify.py. For me the file was in /usr/share/solaar/lib/solaar/ui.

Other important notifications such as battery status are still shown.

The work around from J-8 is effective.

1) Make the change in the file as specified above
2) Make sure to Quit Solaar (or kill -15 the process if it won't quit)
3) (Re)start solaar to load the change
4) turn off your mouse and or keyboard and turn them back on to test the change. The message will not appear now and does not when the devices "power on" from power save mode.

[YorickPeterse]

Closing because desktop environments should have a way to turn off notifications on a per-application basis. XFCE has this feature so full-featured desktop environments should also.

Cinnamon does not have this option built-in, and it's a pretty popular DE (used by Linux Mint for example). The only option that I am aware of is to disable notifications system-wide, which shouldn't be necessary.

[jcolares]

I fixed it upgrading Solaar to version 1.0.3 from Solaar git ppa, according to the instructions in this page: https://launchpad.net/~solaar-unifying/+archive/ubuntu/ppa. Everything works fine now.