erc-burnt-toast — ERC notifications for Windows 10

This project uses the Windows PowerShell module Burnt-Toast to create notifications from ERC in the Windows 10 Notifications Center.

If you have enabled contact pinning and created a contact matching “[email protected]” (or whatever you’ve customized erc-burnt-toast-person to be) and pinned it to the task bar you can also get an animated notification (customized by placing a file path or URL in erc-burnt-toast-image) from the start-menu unless an application is currently full-screen.

Setup and Troubleshooting

This is early alpha software. I’m currently using it but haven’t tested much outside my own use-case (ERC+ercn). Thanks in advance for any issues you trouble to report.

Install and configure the Burnt-Toast module for Windows PowerShell before using this package.

You should then be able to place erc-burnt-toast somewhere on your load-path and use as such:

(eval-after-load 'erc-match
  (progn (require 'erc-burnt-toast)
	   (erc-burnt-toast-mode 1)))

If you use ercn try something like this, instead:

(eval-after-load 'ercn
  (progn
    (require 'erc-burnt-toast)
    (add-hook 'ercn-notify-hook
	        (lambda (nickname message)
	  	(erc-burnt-toast-command "[email protected]" nickname message)))))

It is also possible to invoke erc-burnt-toast-command interactively or from Emacs Lisp code unrelated to ERC/IRC.

(erc-burnt-toast-command "[email protected]"
                         "title string"
			   "message string")

If the value given for person matches the Emacs address of a contact pinned to the Windows task-bar display erc-burnt-toast-image floating over the desktop. Otherwise, and in any case, toast is sent to the Windows 10 Notification center with title shown in bold above message.

You can control the value used for person for erc generated notifications by customizing erc-burnt-toast-person.

Some features may also potentially disabled from the Windows 10 Notification Center Preference Control Panel; be sure to double check those settings first if are having trouble.

The alpha version leaves in place version debugging including a dump of the PowerShell command used. The commands echoed to Messages are suitable for use in cmd.exe however it should be simple to extract the embedded PowerShell command for debugging purposes. Please make sure you can successfully issue Burnt-Toast notifications from PowerShell before opening issues.

Thanks for all the help!

Thanks to bandali (the ERC maintainer for GNU Emacs) and a host of others on EFNet #ERC and #Emacs for support in creating and troubleshooting. Thanks also to Xah Lee for his excellent website, and to everybody who works on the EmacsWiki. I learned a great deal from emacs-package-dev-handbook as well as from the documentation and sources of Joshua King’s Burnt-Toast module for Windows PowerShell, on which this program relies.

I welcome patches and github issues including those which offer suggestions, questions and commentary.

Your beautiful. Thanks.