macOS: system notifications do not appear in Alacritty when terminal-notifier is installed

[requenajorge1995]

Is this a reproducible bug?

• I confirm this is a reproducible bug, not a feature request, idea, question, contribution proposal, or direction check.
• I reproduced this bug on the version and environment reported below using the exact steps provided.

Current behavior

With ui.toast.delivery = "system", a background Pi agent completing in Herdr plays the completion sound but no macOS notification banner appears. terminal-notifier is installed and enabled in System Settings.

Expected behavior

A macOS notification banner should appear for the background agent completion.

Reproduction

1. Install terminal-notifier with Homebrew and enable its notifications in System Settings.
2. In Herdr, configure [ui.toast] delivery = "system".
3. Run Herdr in Alacritty and start a Pi agent.
4. Put Alacritty in the background before the agent finishes.
5. Let the agent finish.
6. Hear the completion sound, but no notification banner appears.

Impact

I cannot rely on Herdr desktop notifications to know when background agents finish.

Environment

• Herdr version: 0.8.0
• Update channel (stable or preview): stable
• Operating system: macOS 26.5.2 (25F84)
• Terminal: Alacritty 0.16.1
• Shell, if relevant: zsh
• Relevant config, if any: [ui.toast] delivery = "system"; terminal-notifier 2.0.0 installed via Homebrew

[ogulcancelik]

Thanks for the report. I couldn’t reproduce this on macOS 26.5.2 with Herdr 0.8.0 and terminal-notifier 2.0.0.

Could you run the command Herdr effectively uses and confirm whether it shows a banner?

terminal-notifier \
  -title "Herdr test" \
  -message "Direct notification test" \
  -activate org.alacritty

Please also confirm the exit status:

echo $?

There are upstream reports of terminal-notifier 2.0.0 exiting successfully without displaying a banner on recent macOS versions: #307 and #312. This test will tell us whether the failure occurs inside Herdr or in terminal-notifier/macOS.

[requenajorge1995]

Thanks for checking this!

This appears to match the Tahoe report in terminal-notifier#312: terminal-notifier exits successfully but does not show a banner without -sender.

I reproduced that on macOS 26.5.2 with terminal-notifier 2.0.0. Herdr's effective command exits with status 0 but shows no banner; adding -sender org.alacritty shows it reliably.

As a local workaround, I added a ~/.local/bin/terminal-notifier wrapper. It delegates to /opt/homebrew/bin/terminal-notifier and appends -sender org.alacritty to Herdr's invocation, so Herdr notifications are working for me now.

[ogulcancelik]

Thanks, that confirms the same terminal-notifier behavior reported upstream.

One more check before we adopt -sender in Herdr: when you click a notification produced with -sender org.alacritty, does it still bring Alacritty to the foreground? Upstream reports suggest -sender can interfere with -activate, so we need to verify both banner delivery and click behavior.

[requenajorge1995]

I have an update. Sorry for the confusion.

I tested this on another Mac with the same versions of macOS, Alacritty, Herdr, and terminal-notifier, and the notifications worked as expected. I then restarted the Mac where I originally encountered the issue, and the problem disappeared there as well. This may have been a temporary macOS notification issue, as that machine had not been restarted in quite some time.

Unfortunately, this means I can no longer reproduce the original issue reliably. Thank you for taking the time to investigate it.

Regarding your question, I can confirm that adding --sender org.alacritty prevents the notification from bringing Alacritty to the foreground when clicked. It also replaces the terminal-notifier icon with Alacritty’s icon. Based on this, I would not recommend adding --sender to Herdr, especially since it does not appear to be necessary.

[ogulcancelik]

@requenajorge1995 thanks for the explanation and tests. i'm closing this for now then!