Dunst

is a lightweight replacement for the notification daemons provided by most desktop environments. It’s very customizable, and isn’t dependent on any toolkits.

Unmerge other notification daemons
In order to avoid confusion other notification daemons could be removed, e.g. :

Start dunst
should start a notification daemon automatically, but if multiple are installed then it may just pick one. Starting dunst before any other notification daemons are fired up will make sure that dunst will handle your notifications. Review the used desktop setup on how to autostart programs.

Configuration
After the installation you will have a sample configuration file, which should be copied to.

Customize to your heart's content.

Testing
Test your notifications with :

Do not forget to kill dunst when you have changed your configuration file.