How to Customize Mac Notification Center

Introduced with OS X Mountain Lion in 2012, Notification Center has quickly become a major feature for Mac users. Here’s how to customize it and get the most out of it.

Mac Notification Center can be accessed by clicking the Notification Center icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. This will open the Notification Center. Notification Center has two sections: Notifications and Today.

Notifications will obviously consist of all the notifications you receive, and you can customize which apps give you notifications and which don’t. As for the Today section, it contains all the widgets you want quick access to when you open Notification Center. You can view the weather, world clocks, reminders, upcoming events and much more.

If you want to get the most out of your Mac’s Notification Center, here’s how to customize it to make it yours.

Customize Notifications

To customize which apps you get notifications for and which apps you mute, you can do this by clicking inside and on it.

It’s very similar to how it works in iOS 8, but you can choose which apps have notifications enabled and which apps are inactive by clicking and dragging apps on the left sidebar into two different sections.

Personally, I only have notifications enabled for a small handful of apps because I don’t like getting a bunch of notifications all the time, but you might be someone who takes advantage of them, so customize your apps accordingly.

Customize Widgets

In the Notification Center section, you will find that you can add widgets for quick access to various information. To add widgets to this section, simply follow these simple steps:

1. Click all the way on the Notification Center icon in the upper right corner of the screen in the menu bar. This opens the Notification Center.
2. Click the tab if it’s not there yet, and then click below.
3. On the right there will be a list of widgets you can add. To add the widget to the Notification Center, simply click the little green button to its right.
4. Click at the bottom to save the changes.

To remove a widget, all you have to do is go back to Edit and then click the little red button next to the widget you want to delete.

A warning though: Widgets can degrade performance and have a noticeable effect if you have an older and slower Mac, so be aware of this when adding widgets. If you’re seeing performance degradation, it might be a good idea to disable all widgets completely.

Disable Notification Center Completely

For some users the Notification Center in OS X is great, but for other users it is useless at all. If you’re never going to use it then why is it running in the background and taking up resources?

Actually, you can disable Notification Center completely. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Open the app inside.
2. Copy and paste this command into the Terminal window and press: launchctl dump -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist
3. Next, paste this command into Terminal and press: killall Notification Center

Notification Center will officially disappear and the little icon in the menu bar will disappear. However, when you swipe with two fingers from the right side, a gray space mark will still appear where Notification Center used to be. To disable this swipe gesture, follow these steps:

1. Open and click.
2. Click the tab and uncheck it.