Automatically remove notifications when message has been read

[cweiske]

When I receive an e-mail in Thunderbird or a chat message in Dino and Slack, the Gnome Shell shows a notification.

I open/switch to the application (without clicking on the notification), read the message - and the notification stays there in the shell. I have to manually remove the notification.

This is with Gnome Shell 48.7 on Debian 13.

Is this the way it has to be, or should notifications get removed automatically when I view the message in the application that sent the notification?

[skeller (Sebastian Keller)]

It is up to the applications to close notifications when they no longer apply. The shell has no way of knowing when you have read the message.

[cweiske]

But there is a way for applications to close them?

Do you know which applications do this?

[skeller (Sebastian Keller)]

org.freedesktop.Notifications.CloseNotification - D-BUS Protocol | Desktop...

[cweiske]

Dino:

• notification should get removed when convesation is focused: dino/libdino/src/service/notification_events.vala at v0.5.1 · dino/dino · GitHub
• this calls GLib.Application.get_default().withdraw_notification(): dino/main/src/ui/notifier_gnotifications.vala at v0.5.1 · dino/dino · GitHub
• So Dino’s notification should get removed automatically.
• I just tested that with a single message - it got removed from the notification bar automatically after viewing it in Dino (Debian 13 and Dino 0.5.0-1 and Gnome Shell 48.7). I will have to do more testing under which circumstances that does not happen.

Thunderbird:

• Now in my test the notification was automatically removed when opening the corresponding account in Thunderbird. (Thunderbird 140.13.0esr)

Slack:

• Desktop notifications stay after I read them in Slack.
• I opened a support ticket with them.

[cweiske]

Slack support replied:

Just to clarify, this is an expected behavior system notifications have to be manually cleared on Linux, Slack doesn’t support automatic clearing of desktop notifications once the message has been read.

I get that this differs from how Thunderbird and Dino handle it, but that’s simply how Slack’s Linux client currently manages notifications. Sorry we can’t help with this right now, but it’s the kind of thing that could be looked into down the line.