You may have noticed that Ubuntu (well, GNOME Shell) doesn’t let you customise notifications. If you want to change where alerts appear, or how long they stay on screen, you seemingly can’t.

Well, actually, you can – using GNOME Shell extensions1, of course.

The way notifications behave and where they’re located on screen works well for most people. Notifications show at the top of the screen, in the middle, under the Date menu – which, when clicked, is also the notification hub.

For greater control over the look and position of desktop notifications on Ubuntu, like moving notifications to the right-side of the screen, changing the time before the vanish or even filtering them before they show up, a brand-new GNOME Shell extension can help.

Meet the…

GNOME Shell Notification Configurator

The Notification Configurator settings screens showing various options.
Move, colour and control alerts

Notification Configurator is a GNOME Shell extension developed by Artem Prokop. It is designed just for customising notifications, nothing else, and is fairly comprehensive as a result – great news for fans of niche tweaks!

It’s not the first GNOME extension to do this (though most of the ones I’ve covered in the past don’t work with the latest GNOME releases), but it lets you change and adjust things I’ve not seen previous attempts offer.

Artem’s Notification Configurator allows you to do the following:

  • Set notification position – top fill, left, centre, right (it can’t move to bottom)
  • Set notification rate limiting to not see alerts from the same app within a set period
  • Block or hide notifications from apps, or alerts containing specific words
  • Customise notification colour including only for individual apps
  • Enable or disable notifications in fullscreen mode

A ‘test notification’ feature makes it possible to preview the changes you make, as you make them. These test-toasts are especially useful when playing around with custom colour themes and the filtering options.

The notification tester allows you to preview changes

Expect more features to be added in future updates, though there are limitations to what this (or any) extension can do since it’s not replacing GNOME’s native notification system, merely hooking in to and tweaking it.

If you fancy installing this extension, it’s available on the GNOME Extensions website. It supports GNOME 46 through 51, so if you’re on a recent version of Ubuntu, you can easily try ti out.

Get Notifications Configurator on GNOME Extensions

  1. GNOME cops flack for “not having many settings”, but that’s not fair: it does, just most are hidden. GNOME curates an experience, and each toggle and switch it adds to the GUI mean another potential combination its has to test and support. Permutations scale! Thus, when we choose to install extensions or apps or otherwise change a hidden setting ourselves, we do it knowing we take responsibility if it screws something up. ↩︎