How to Change Location of Notification Banners on Mac with PingPlace
Notifications arrive on the Mac as banners appearing in the top right corner of your display, but have you ever wished your could change the location of those notification banners and alerts? Maybe you’d prefer the notification banners to appear in the bottom right corner instead, or the top middle, or the bottom left? With a handy little third party Mac app called PingPlace, you can switch the location of notifications to elsewhere on the Mac screen, and it’s super easy to use.
PingPlace is free, open source, and easy to use. If you’re unfamiliar with downloading apps from Github this article may be useful but otherwise go to the project page and then head to “Releases” to find the latest version to download:
If you have Homebrew installed on your Mac with Sequoia, Sonoma, or Ventura, you can also install PingPlace through HomeBrew with the following two commands:
brew tap notwadegrimridge/brew
brew install pingplace --no-quarantine
Since the PingPlace app isn’t from a developer verified with Apple, you’ll then need to bypass Gatekeeper security precautions to be able to open the app (whether or not you trust PingPlace is up to you, it’s open source so you can always sniff around the source if you’re a developer or paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze it for you for anything alarming). You will also need to grant PingPlace some Accessibility permission privileges as well so that it can move the notifications banner to somewhere else on your Mac screen.
Once that’s all together, you have the following options for where you’d like your notifications to arrive on the Mac display, which you can select from the PingPlace dropdown menu:
- Top right (the default for MacOS)
- Top left
- Top middle (app default)
- Middle left
- Middle right
- Bottom right
- Bottom left
- Bottom middle
Choose whichever works for you, and whichever is the least intrusive (or most intrusive, depending on your objective!) to how you use your Mac and how you want notifications to arrive. Or, if you’re someone who absolutely hates any kind of notifications and alerts on their Mac, you might want to take this further and combine it with setting the Mac to always be in Do Not Disturb mode to have some peace and quiet as you work.
This utility offers a customization that is handy enough that you’d think Apple could adopt the same features in a future version of MacOS, since Mac users can also move the Dock around, and more customization options are always great.
What do you think of fun little customizations like this for MacOS? Do you care about where notifications might be showing up on the screen? Do you wish this was a native feature in MacOS to change without using a third party app? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing out this fun little app.
