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I run Windows 10. I'm trying to display a subtle but clear visual indication on my screen when my custom-built system tells it to, in some elegant/useful manner.

The first thing I do when reinstalling my OS is to turn off the obnoxious "notifications" entirely. It is not an option to turn these on, because they drive me insane with how badly that whole system is designed, and they have so much useless noise. This is why I need a different solution.

In Windows XP, and perhaps Windows 7 (I forget), there was this really nice "balloon pop-up" kind of notification in the bottom-right corner. I wish I could get something like that back.

Ideally, I would just want a "Notification area" icon which simply visually displays a number such as "1" or "0" or "5", depending on what information I send into it with a terminal command such as:

update-notification-icon.exe 5

I already have created an entire "notifications" system of my own (the database and management part), as my issue is purely to find a way to visually display it in a manner which doesn't require me to press F1 on my keyboard, which I've AutoHotKeyed into loading my web-based control panel.

The only thing I've thought of is to play a sound every time my system receives a notification, but this gets annoying to say the least. I often record audio and then this pollutes my recordings, and sometimes I'm away when the notification arrives, so I'd still miss them.

Is there really no such little utility? I'm almost sure that there must be, but finding it is absolutely hopeless. Any search including "notifications" just finds unrelated garbage search results which have nothing to do with this.

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  • Are you a programmer? If so, what languages do you know? Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 15:26

1 Answer 1

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The wxWidgets & wxPython bindings to it include a couple of ways of doing this sort of thing, as evidenced by the wxPython demo program.

One such mechanism is the wx.adv.NotificationMessage this is in wxPython only: enter image description here With this you could have a command line script in under ten lines of code.

You could also consider using a wx.adv.TeskBarIcon with different icons for your message numbers (and a short duration hover message).

Or of course you could display a message window or dialog.

  • Python is free, gratis & open-source,
  • Python installation on Windows, (download from the python web site and run the installer.
  • wxPython is free, gratis & open-source,
  • wxPython installation: Once python is installed, open a command prompt and type pip install wxpython
  • wxPython Demo Installation: At the command prompt type: wxdemo The first time after a new wxPython install it will download and unpack the demo for that version.
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    This isn't helpful if one isn't a Python developer. Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 15:27
  • @JayBienvenu One doesn't need to be a Python developer to be able to implement this with the information provided. It takes very little effort to learn enough to be able to do something useful. Since the OP states that they have already implemented their own notifications database I assumed that they would be able to follow the above without any major problems. Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 17:13
  • The quick brown fox jumped over the python :)
    – Joachim
    Commented Jan 18, 2023 at 15:20

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