How to change the banner notification dismiss time on macOS
macOS has two different types of notifications that it can show you; banners and alerts. Alerts stay on your screen until you dismiss them and banners dismiss themselves after five seconds. This might be too long, or not long enough. It’s something that may differ from one user to another. macOS doesn’t let users choose how long the banner notification stays on your screen before it automatically dismisses itself. That said, a simple terminal command lets you change the banner notification dismiss time to anything you want. Here’s what you need to do.
Banner notification dismiss time
Open the Terminal and run the following command. Replace the number at the end with how long you want a banner notification to stay on your screen before it is dismissed. The time is in seconds. The default duration is five seconds.
defaults write com.apple.notificationcenterui bannerTime -int 10
After you run the command, you have to restart your Mac. Do not skip this step.
That will do the trick. Banner notifications from all apps that are allowed to show notifications will stick around for the duration you set for them. This is a uniform setting that will apply to all banner notifications and it can’t be set on a per-app basis. You can always disable notifications for an app if you don’t want to see notifications from it.
We mentioned earlier that macOS has two types of notifications. The banners are the type of notifications that are dismissed automatically so if you’re looking for notifications that appear but also disappear without user intervention, they’re the type you should use. If the only reason you’re looking to change the duration of the banner type notification is that it is dismissed too soon, you can always try using the Alerts instead.
You can set the notification type on a per-app basis. For apps that send more important, critical notifications, you can use the Alert type. For less important notifications, you can use banners.
It’s odd that macOS doesn’t give users an option to change the banner duration from the System Preferences app. Windows 10 is the exact opposite; it gives users a few preset options to change how long a toast notification is visible before it is dismissed however, there’s no command you can use to set a custom duration. It’s a terrible shortcoming that Windows 10 has but it seems like Apple has one to match it. All that can be said is that at least there’s a Terminal command to get around it.
