Use terminal-notifier or alerter when available

[sagikazarmark]

The above tools yield much nicer notifications/alerts in my opinion and as far as I can tell, they also allow using non-bundled icons:

• https://github.com/julienXX/terminal-notifier
• https://github.com/vjeantet/alerter

[gen2brain]

What are the chances that the user will have that installed? The first app seems to be packaged as a bundle, so I guess it will not be in PATH. It can be added if these are popular apps that users can install easily, but I will not be able to test it for some time until I fix my VM.

[sagikazarmark]

I think these are the most popular alternatives to notify-send on macOS. Using them might need some sort of configuration (or an alias or a wrapper shell script).

[brandonwkipp]

@gen2brain They don't necessarily need to be installed on the user's machine, for instance gosxnotifier embeds the binary for terminal-notifier.

[gen2brain]

@brandonwkipp As discussed in some other issues, I don't like that approach, it embeds the foreign app/binary in source code. If it is installed it will be used, otherwise, it will just fall back to osascript.

[gen2brain]

Support for terminal-notifier is implemented in 270fd0a. Though the only feature is that clicking on the notification doesn't open the AppleScript editor.

The -appIcon or -contentImage option no longer works. I do encode PNG to ICNS in code. I tried with some already existing icons without success. Though there is a big WARNING: This option is subject to change, since it relies on a private method. The only way it worked was to use the -sender option with CFBundleIdentifier from some other app that is packaged in a bundle.

I did testing in VM with macOS Sonoma. I would appreciate it if someone else could try, preferably a different version of the OS.

[gen2brain]

alerter is just a split project from terminal-notifier with support for actions. It also appears not to be maintained.
Well, the support is here; if they managed to fix it, good. NSUserNotification they are using is now deprecated, and UNUserNotification should be used instead.