Before I used Obarun I was used to just setting up dunst to tell me the current song playing and calling it a day. Since dunst requires systemd, or at least it does on the arch repos, I figured I would try an alternative. I figured it out, it's a bit duct-tapey, but it does the job.

In comes herbe (https://github.com/dudik/herbe) as a minimalist notification thingy. It doesn't run in the background, it just makes a notification when told to do so. This is just fine for me as I only want notifications to tell me what song just started (I have a lot of Music, don't have every track name memorized).

If herbe just spits out arbitrary text as a notification, how do I get cmus to tell it what to say? I found another script steal which can output the current cmus status in a single line (https://crates.io/crates/cmus-status-line)

I put it together with my graceful, expert level scripting skills.
poop=$(~/.cargo/bin/cmus-status-line) 
herbe "$poop"
then told cmus to run this script whenever it switches songs.
 :set status_display_program=/home/cmde/cmus_current 
not a beautiful solution, but it is my solution!

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