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Disable/hide all steam notifications

By BlatheringTumorCells

This poorly designed guide will show you how to hide all steam notifications on desktop and/or in-game, whichever you prefer.
For people who are confused about this, there are certain notifications ex. Friend invites, Group invites, New items, etc. that you cannot hide using steam settings, you could hide these in-game by disabling steam overlay, but then you can no longer take steam screenshots, use the streaming thing, all kinds of crap, and a really important one cannot trade in-game. So disabling the overlay just because of notifications is a crap idea and you should actually use this method instead.

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BlatheringTumorCells
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Languages: English

Posted

Updated

28 May, 2017 @ 7:29am

28 May, 2017 @ 7:37am

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Guide Index

Overview

Step 1: Basic stuff

Step 2 (1): Hiding all notifications (desktop and in-game)

Step 2 (2): Hiding in-game notifications only

Step 2 (3): Hiding desktop notifications only (still have them in-game)

Step 3: Finishing up

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Step 1: Basic stuff

Go to your Steam directory (where steam.exe is located at)
Create a new folder in \skins with some name (I will refer to it as notif)
Create a new folder in notif called resource
Create a new folder in resource called styles
The folder path should be \skins\notif\resource\styles unless you are incapable of doing anything right.

Now check which of the step 2s is what you actually want to do and follow those instructions.

Step 2 (1): Hiding all notifications (desktop and in-game)

Go to your Steam directory (where steam.exe is located at)
Copy the file steam.styles from \resource\styles\ folder
Paste the file to \skins\notif\resource\styles\
Open the file with a good text editor that has at least a search function
Press CTRL+F, find " Notifications.PanelPosition ", you should see this:
Notifications.PanelPosition "BottomRight" Notifications.PanelPosition "TopRight" [$OSX] Notifications.SlideDirection "Vertical" Notifications.FadeInTime "0.45" Notifications.FadeOutTime "0.45" Notifications.DisplayTime "6.0" Notifications.StackSize "3"
Replace those lines with these:
Notifications.PanelPosition "BottomRight" // Can be "BottomRight", "BottomLeft", "TopRight", "TopLeft" Notifications.PanelPosition "TopRight" [$OSX] // the dock is on the bottom for OSX, so instead pop top right like other apps do Notifications.SlideDirection "None" // Can be "Vertical", "Horizontal", "None" and controls slide effect Notifications.FadeInTime "0" // Controls the time it takes to slide/fade into view Notifications.FadeOutTime "0" // Controls the time it takes to slide/fade out of view Notifications.DisplayTime "0" // Controls the length of time at steady state after fade in and before fade out Notifications.StackSize "0" // Controls how many panels we will stack before background queuing

You might have to update the file every so often because of steam updates, so far I haven't had the need to do so.

Step 2 (2): Hiding in-game notifications only

Go to your Steam directory (where steam.exe is located at)
Copy the file gameoverlay.styles from \resource\styles\ folder
Paste the file to \skins\notif\resource\styles\
Open the file with a text editor (The file is quite short compared to steam.styles)
Find the line that says " Notifications.PanelPosition "
Replace that line with all of this:
Notifications.PanelPosition "BottomRight" // osx has toast in the upper right, but in-overlay should not. Notifications.SlideDirection "None" // Can be "Vertical", "Horizontal", "None" and controls slide effect Notifications.FadeInTime "0" // Controls the time it takes to slide/fade into view Notifications.FadeOutTime "0" // Controls the time it takes to slide/fade out of view Notifications.DisplayTime "0" // Controls the length of time at steady state after fade in and before fade out Notifications.StackSize "0" // Controls how many panels we will stack before background queuing

You still have to copy the steam.styles file from \resource\styles\ to your \skins\notif\resource\styles\ folder, this is because Steam is inconvenient and doesn't actually realize your skin exists unless that file is inside that folder.

Step 2 (3): Hiding desktop notifications only (still have them in-game)

Not sure why you would do this but here is how to do it anyway:

Do both Step 2 (1) and Step 2 (2)
Go back to the file gameoverlay.styles in \skins\notif\resource\styles\
Edit the lines you added in Step 2 (2) to be the following:
Notifications.PanelPosition "BottomRight" // osx has toast in the upper right, but in-overlay should not. Notifications.SlideDirection "Vertical" // Can be "Vertical", "Horizontal", "None" and controls slide effect Notifications.FadeInTime "0.45" // Controls the time it takes to slide/fade into view Notifications.FadeOutTime "0.45" // Controls the time it takes to slide/fade out of view Notifications.DisplayTime "6.0" // Controls the length of time at steady state after fade in and before fade out Notifications.StackSize "3" // Controls how many panels we will stack before background queuing

Step 3: Finishing up

Now that you have configured your files to be however you wanted them to be, you need to do the following:

Go to steam settings
On the left side of the settings windows, click the Interface button
There should be a dropdown menu that says " Select the skin you wish Steam to use (requires Steam to restart) ", click on that dropdown menu and select your skin you just made, in this case notif.
Once selected, Press OK and restart Steam.
Done.

Also if you weren't aware, you can disable all the sounds (messages, someone calling, etc.) in-game only too. If you open the volume mixer, receive some message or anything while in-game and you have the overlay on settings enabled, you can actually mute GameOverlayUI.exe which steam uses to play notifications sounds to you while in-game. You will not be able to hear anything using the web browser in the gameoverlay tho.