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Is there a way to see/display notifications' history on Ubuntu 18.04?


EDIT:
I installed indicator-notifications following this answer but, contrary to what was told in the answer,

You will find a little mailbox in the panel:
icon

there was no icon of the tool appearing on my top-bar after I rebooted my PC.
Also, I tested the tool using : notify-send 'test message', I got a normal notification as I used to get before installing the tool, but my question is about viewing the history of notifications (like in a log file or something like that), which I didn't get using this tool (may be I miss-used it).

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    Thank you for asking this question! When notify-osd was part of Ubuntu (Unity), it could be run with the "LOG=1" environment variable to log notifications. Now that gnome-shell seems to have taken over that notification function itself, I wonder if it has (or should have) a similar way to enable logging. It seems crazy to me that some of the most important events in Ubuntu show up as notifications, but not in the /var/log files, with helpful timestamps. E.g. the ephemeral warnings that The volume “Filesystem root” has only xxx MB disk space remaining!
    – nealmcb
    Nov 5, 2018 at 13:36
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    See also this, though it seems kludgy and hard to parse out all the info you really want with shell commands How can I log all notify-send actions? - Ask Ubuntu
    – nealmcb
    Nov 5, 2018 at 13:41
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    @nealmcb Unfortunately gnome-shell in 18.04 does not support normal indicators (only app-indicators) so indicator-notifications will not work. (The fix in that bug was just an upload to my ppa of a version compatible with unity and mate on 18.04). Nov 5, 2018 at 14:12
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    @PawelDebski Nothing yet unfortunately
    – singrium
    Jan 4, 2020 at 13:35
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    For me it seem a basic design flaw. Hard to imagine that there is nothing in /var/log or that there is nothing in some ini file that can make it happen. Jan 4, 2020 at 15:19

2 Answers 2

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The NotifyOSD in Ubuntu does a good job in providing a growl like notification bubble when new event arrive. This is useful if you are always on your computer. If you leave your PC and new notification appears and gone, you won’t be able to know that what you have missed when you return. Recent Notification is a useful applet designed to solve this problem.

Recent Notification works hand in hand with NotifyOSD. It records down all the events notified via NotifyOSD. With a single click, you will be able to view the list of all the past events.

To install in Ubuntu,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jconti/recent-notifications
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-notifications

To use it, you have to right click on the panel and select “Add to Panel” From the window that pops up, select “Recent Notification”.

notification-add-to-panel
You should now see a new applet in your Gnome panel.

notification-applet
Simply click the applet and it will show a window with all your past notifications.

notification-window
Viewing, sorting and managing your notification.
In addition to viewing your recent notification, you can also get it to only show notification from a particular application. For example, I have notification coming from both Pidgin and CloudSN. In the Recent Notification window, I can select from the dropdown list to get it to show only notification from CloudSN.

notification-select-app
For each notification, you can also right click to copy the text or to blacklist the application (so that it won’t appear in the list).

notification-copy-text
Wrapping up
Recent Notification applet is simple, and useful application designed to do what the NotifyOSD can’t. It might not be suitable for everyone, especially those who hate the idea of cluttering the taskbar with yet another applet. For those who like to keep track of the notified events, this is definitely a nifty app to have. Things that I hope to see is the availability of an indicator-applet (rather than a panel applet), or better still, integrate with the messaging menu.

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Click on the clock, or press Super+V, to see all of the notifications that you have not acted upon.

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