Change location of macOS Notification Center alerts?

Question

Is it possible to change where macOS Notification Center alerts appear on the screen?

They currently appear at the top right of the screen with the menu bar:

Alerts appearing in the top right tend to cover up work I'm doing more often than not. They cover up browser tabs, toolbar icons, and window titles.

I would prefer, say, the bottom right corner of the screen.

If moving the alerts is not possible, is it possible to change the screen on which they appear?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you can't change the screen position of the Notification Center Alerts and Banners. This is a huge gripe of mine as well, and I highly encourage you to complain about this issue to Apple here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

Hopefully they will one day change this. I also have not been able to find or formulate any hacks.

I, too, am annoyed by it covering up controls in my modeling applications, tabs in my browser, etc.

You can move the Notification Center to another screen, however your entire menu bar goes with it. When you have more than one monitor active, open up System Preferences > Displays > Arrangement. Click and drag the white bar inside one of the squares representing your current primary monitor and drag it to another monitor.

For notifications that don't need immediate attention, consider changing the alert style from Alerts to Banners. Banners are automatically dismissed into the notification center where you can find them later.

Good luck, and keep spreading the word that we need to tell Apple to make this experience better.

Answer 2

Swipe with two fingers on the banner pop up and it will remove it. Not the best answer but convenient for when I need to access a control or tab.

^{Source: http://www.cultofmac.com/189192/}

Answer 3

You can adjust the time the notification is displayed on the screen:

In a terminal window type:

defaults write com.apple.notificationcenterui bannerTime SECONDS

Where SECONDS is the number of seconds the notice will remain visible. Default is 5 seconds.

Log out and in again to activate the setting.

http://www.defaults-write.com/notification-center-change-banners-display-time

Answer 4

It's not an elegant solution, but I've written a small applescript that moves the notifications down to the center-bottom of my screen (I use a great big 4k TV as a screen and the upper right corner is way out of my line-of-sight). It doesn't work well with the "rest" of the Notification Center (i.e. weather, clocks, stock icons), but it does the job I need it to do (puts the notifications where I can see them). You can customize the set position line to move the notifications to wherever you need them to-- the notification "window" actually covers the whole screen and seems to be the only "moveable" component via applescript that I could find. You can make an Automator/Applescript app out of it and add it to your Login Items, or run it manually by pasting this script into ~/move-notifs.scpt, making it executable (chmod +x ~/move-notifs.scpt), and starting it from the Terminal via ~/move-notifs.scpt & . It will ask for some permissions to access "System Events" and "NotificationCenter" the first time it runs, that you will need to grant.

#!/usr/bin/osascript
repeat while true
  tell application "System Events"
    repeat with theWindow in windows of application process "NotificationCenter"
      set displaySize to size of theWindow
      set notifSize to size of first UI element of first scroll area of first group of theWindow
      set position of theWindow to {-((first item of displaySize)-(first item of notifSize))/2,((second item of displaySize)-(second item of notifSize)-36)}
    end repeat
  end tell
  delay 1
end repeat

Answer 5

Not a very techy guy, and it's my first post here. But I found this and it works. https://github.com/Frostbitee08/NotificationShortcuts

An app that allows you to dismiss notifications with a shortcut!

Answer 6

I can't find a way to move it, but in searching on github, I found this pretty awesome hidden feature that lets you easily disable notifications.

... you can hold option (alt) and click on the Notification Center icon to disable it

Edit: Option click on the Date & Time in the upper right corner to toggle them on/off.

Answer 7

Short answer (TLDR): You can't. Use focus and optional notification settings.

Long answer: I despise the notifications as well. But that's what they are. Nagging little brats. Of course you could move them down all to the right. But that is not possible in early 2023. That position would be the perfect spot. But maybe not, because you might miss something down there. At least for me, that would be the case. So if you really need to focus and notifications are unbearable, QUICKFIX: just select focus for one hour - or longer. You don't like to be distracted right now anyway. Probably not even down to the right. So off they go. ALL of them. For one hour. But refrain from focus for forever unless you really don't want to receive any messages or calls at all.

A longterm solution is to use custom focuses and optional enable notifications for wanted applications.

Answer 8

Using a combination of @andrew-a's answer plus this answer from @lairtonlelis to a similar question, I have it working on Sonoma 14.5

#!/usr/bin/osascript
repeat while true
    tell application "System Events"
        try
            set theWindow to window "Notification Center" of application process "NotificationCenter"
            set displaySize to size of theWindow
            # log displaySize
            set _groups to groups of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of theWindow
            repeat with _group in _groups
                # You can limit it to move only certain notifications
                #
                # set primaryLabel to value of static text 1 of _group
                # set secondaryLabel to value of static text 2 of _group
                # 
                # if primaryLabel contains "Slack" then...
                # if secondaryLabel contains "Google Calendar" then...

                set notifSize to size of _group
                # log notifSize

                # position 0,0 is top right corner
                set position of theWindow to {-((first item of displaySize) - (first item of notifSize)) / 2, 0}
                # log position
            end repeat
        on error errText number errNum
            # Error -1719 == group not found, i.e. it was dismissed
            # Error -1728 == notification window not found, i.e. no notifications
            if ({-1719, -1728} does not contain {errNum}) then
                display dialog "move-notif error: " & errNum & return & errText
            end if
        end try
    end tell
    delay 1
end repeat

Answer 9

To improve this behavior somewhat, change the alert style from Alerts to Banners.

Banners will at least go away automatically. Alerts will remain on screen until dismissed, blocking anything under them.

I thought I was the only one who found this annoying.