View full message from gnome notifications area

Question

The Gnome Notifications area only shows the title and a portion of the first line of a message.

Clicking on the message in the Notifications area simply removes the message. I've tried looking at the Logs, but do not see the message there.

How can I view the full message?

In the screen shot below, there is a message about network discovery, but I can't see the rest of the message.

Answer 1

Answer

If what you are looking is to see the full message somewhere, the GNOME extension "Notifications to file" allows you to store the notifications to a file of choice.

Expert mode

If you are looking to see the full message in the notification list of your screenshot, you may want to change the CSS of that specific section of GNOME. There are some tutorials that help to do this, but I do not recommend to go this route unless you know what you are doing. You can see the documentation on Gnome Shell wiki page.

You can find all CSS related to these notifications on the file gnome-shell.css of your gnome-shell theme, located on:

/usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

The CSS related to these specific notifications are under the CSS class .message-list.

Answer 2

There are various add-ons that might help.

This stops apps removing their own: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1335/grown-up-notifications/

This keeps them visible until clicked: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/41/permanent-notifications/

This shows a counter: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1386/notification-counter/

And so on. You might need to try some combination to see if that helps...

Answer 3

A bullet-proof method to see all notifications, full notification messages
(The method provides access to all, full notification messages. A finer grained handling of them is possible).

The "basic" command dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'" will show info on every notification. For instance, if in terminal #1 I execute that command, and in terminal #2 I execute notify-send -u normal 'testing', I get in terminal #1

method call time=1650533140.066199 sender=:1.357 -> destination=:1.69 serial=6 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; interface=org.freedesktop.Notifications; member=GetServerInformation
method call time=1650533140.067533 sender=:1.69 -> destination=:1.49 serial=305 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; interface=org.freedesktop.Notifications; member=GetServerInformation
method call time=1650533140.122757 sender=:1.357 -> destination=:1.69 serial=7 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; interface=org.freedesktop.Notifications; member=Notify
   string "notify-send"
   uint32 0
   string ""
   string "testing"
   string ""
   array [
   ]
   array [
      dict entry(
         string "urgency"
         variant             byte 1
      )
   ]
   int32 -1
method call time=1650533140.131442 sender=:1.69 -> destination=:1.49 serial=310 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; interface=org.freedesktop.Notifications; member=Notify
   string "notify-send"
   uint32 0
   string ""
   string "testing"
   string ""
   array [
   ]
   array [
      dict entry(
         string "urgency"
         variant             byte 1
      )
      dict entry(
         string "sender-pid"
         variant             uint32 87009
      )
   ]
   int32 -1

From this point on, you could handle that information as you like. For instance, you could:

1. Send that info to a log file (surely needed). Note: This is enough to view the full messages, as requested in the OP
2. grep/awk/sed, etc. the output
3. Place your command in your .bashrc, .profile, etc.
4. Postprocess the timestamp.
5. Automate maintenance of the log file (cleaning old notifications, etc.)

I don't know if there is anything already available as a starting point. A few pointers I found are:

1. How to read dbus-monitor output?. General info and python code to handle notifications. Also a link to indicator-notifications (recent-notifications).
2. Parsing dbus monitor output messages
3. https://github.com/tstack/lnav/issues/505

Answer 4

The extension Expandable Notifications is just for this purpose. Enable it and you'll see a small expandable triangle besides each notification.

GNOME has this issue tracked at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/753 . If you want to see this feature built into GNOME, please upvote there.

Answer 5

Have you tried the Notify OSD app? It is quit useful if you want to configure your notifications. You can read more about it here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD

Here are the steps how to install it from the terminal:

sudo apt install notify-osd
pkill notify-osd
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt update
sudo apt install notifyosdconfig