keybase-chat-notifier

Keybase comes in a few flavors: as a command-line tool, a browser extension, and as a "standalone" Electron application. Chances are you are using the latter of these if you have a nice GUI for your keybase chats. However, there are a few reasons why you may not want to install the Electron version. First, it comes with a full bundled browser (which may also be outdated). Second, it's a pretty heavy-weight solution if you just want to keep on top of messages. And finally, it requires that you keep another application running on your desktop, which can get messy quickly. How many chat applications do you have running already?

This application aims to provide you with another lightweight alternative. It uses the keybase chat api-listen command to watch for incoming messages, massages and filters them a bit, and then sends them to your favorite operating system notification daemon for display. How you then choose to view the messages is up to you. Personally, I'll then just use the command-line keybase chat command, but whatever floats your boat.

To install the tool, make sure you have a somewhat recent Rust compiler installed and ~/.cargo/bin in your $PATH. Then run:

$ cargo install keybase-chat-notifier
$ keybase chat api-listen | keybase-chat-notifier

If you want a local checkout instead, run:

$ git clone https://github.com/jonhoo/keybase-chat-notifier.git
$ cd keybase-chat-notifier
$ keybase chat api-listen | cargo run

Customization

Very limited at the moment. The appearance of the notifications is mostly controlled by whatever your notification system does. You can use --icon to choose which icon is used for the notifications (macOS probably ignores that though). You can also use --me to set which username "you" are considered to have for the purposes of filtering out your own messages (if not set, the tool uses keybase status).

The notifications on my machine look like this:

Happy to review PRs for additional features should you think of one you wish to see.