Have you ever wanted to send desktop notifications from your command line on macOS?

This can be particularly useful when you want to be notified when a long-running process completes. For example, you could append ; notify "Task completed!" to any command.

While there are several ways to do this, I find using AppleScript through the osascript command to be the simplest approach. Here’s a handy shell function that lets you send notifications with just a single command.

To use this notification function, you’ll need to add it to your shell’s configuration file. If you’re using zsh (the default shell on modern macOS), add the following function to your ~/.zshrc file. If you’re using bash, add it to your ~/.bashrc instead.

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notify() {
  local message="$1"
  local title="${2:-Notification}" 

  if [[ -z "$message" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: notify <message> [title]"
    return 1
  fi

  osascript -e "display notification \"$message\" with title \"$title\""
}

Usage

With a custom title:

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notify "hello world!" "Custom Title"

Without a custom title:

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notify "hello world!"