View Recent GNOME Notifications

Question

Is there an app/command that allows me to view recent notifications?

Preferably text-based.

I would also like to view the notification timeout for each notification. ;)

Answer 1

There isn't any command for retrieving previously send messages in Desktop Notifications Specification so my guess is that they are discarded after retrieving.

You can however observe these using dbus-monitor command, like this:

$ dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'"

Sending simple notification:

$ notify-send "Hello there"

results with following information:

method call time=1555095758.597788 sender=:1.385 -> destination=:1.386 serial=6 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; interface=org.freedesktop.Notifications; member=GetServerInformation
method call time=1555095758.601101 sender=:1.385 -> destination=:1.386 serial=7 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; interface=org.freedesktop.Notifications; member=Notify
   string "notify-send"
   uint32 0
   string ""
   string "Hello there"
   string ""
   array [
   ]
   array [
      dict entry(
         string "urgency"
         variant             byte 1
      )
   ]
   int32 -1
signal time=1555095765.734845 sender=:1.386 -> destination=:1.385 serial=15 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; interface=org.freedesktop.Notifications; member=NotificationClosed
   uint32 1
   uint32 1

Time field is an UNIX timestamp, can be translated like this:

$ date -d @1555095765
Fri Apr 12 21:02:45 CEST 2019

Answer 2

I've been using this for over a year on UbuntuMate 16/18

https://launchpad.net/~jconti/+archive/ubuntu/recent-notifications

http://ppa.launchpad.net/jconti/recent-notifications/ubuntu