This isn't up to the notifications daemon; the window manager is the ultimate arbiter of window stacking.  Xfce4-notifyd marks its windows as type 'notification', the WM decides they're less important than full-screen apps.

This has kinda annoyed me for a while, because there are some notifications I do want to see when running a full-screen app.  But then again, if I were doing a presentation on a projector or something, I'd want notifications to be hidden.  So it's a hard call.  Up to Olivier, really...

Apropos presentation, recently my notebook went quite unexpectedly into hibernation (as it should on critical power level), because the power manager notifications were hidden by a full screen pdf.

Comment 3 Jérôme Guelfucci 2012-12-05 21:37:28 CET

*** Bug 9375 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Note: "notify-send --urgency=critical Hello" still works in fullscreen.

Sadly, if you open new windows above your fullscreen window, it still counts as being in fullscreen.

Isn't workaround for this? Notifications are not working in the fullscreen for today.

Counter to what was said in Comment #4, notify-send -u critical or --urgency=critical does not display over a full-screen window for me using either Openbox or xfwm4 and Debian jessie (xfce4-notifyd 0.2.4-3) . I'm using it as a battery notification from lxpanel and, since -u critical does not time out, I can end up with a screen full of notifications if I catch it before the computer shuts down.

Created attachment 6427 
Patch to display notifications on top of fullscreen windows

Here's a patch that makes Xfwm4 recognise notifications as it's own type of window and display them above fullscreen windows. You can revert to the old behaviour (notifications below fullscreen windows) by adding the boolean configuration value /xfwm4/general/show_notifications_above_fullscreen with the value 'false'.

Created attachment 6428 
Git-specific patch to display notifications above fullscreen windows

And here's the same patch in 'git am' format to preserve authorship information.

Both patches apply cleanly to the latest master, but I have only tried building it against xfwm4-4.10.1 as that is what I was using on Debian and I didn't want to install new incompatible dependencies.

Comment 9 Olivier Fourdan 2015-08-25 10:52:20 CEST

(In reply to Lars Luthman from comment #8)
> Created attachment 6428 
> Git-specific patch to display notifications above fullscreen windows
> 
> And here's the same patch in 'git am' format to preserve authorship
> information.
> 
> Both patches apply cleanly to the latest master, but I have only tried
> building it against xfwm4-4.10.1 as that is what I was using on Debian and I
> didn't want to install new incompatible dependencies.

Thanks for the patch!

Couple of comments:

 - Please make a clear and explicit commit message, and avoid a long topic for the first line. Also please refer to this bug in the commit message (you could take other commit messages as an example, even if not all are perfect, admittedly)

 - I reckon the layer for notifications should be called "WIN_LAYER_NOTIFICATION" rather than "WIN_LAYER_ABOVE_FULLSCREEN"

 - Please don't make it optional, either we want this or we don't, there is no need to add complexity to make this user configurable.

Created attachment 6429 
Improved patch as per suggestions

Improved patch as per suggestions in comment #9. The configuration option is removed, the layer name is changed to WIN_LAYER_NOTIFICATION, the commit message is hopefully clearer and with neater formatting.

Built latest git, patch works fine. Tested over cs go (fullscreen mode) and Libreoffice. So even games do not crash/quit/minimize. Bug may be closed

Comment 12 Olivier Fourdan 2015-08-28 08:56:01 CEST

Merged in master a couple of days ago, thanks.