Most of emacs is miraculously self-documenting but I found a bare-spot: how to customize emacs notifications. In particular, being an exwm user the in-emacs mini-buffer with Dunst, I hope. There’s a dirth of documentation on the appointment variables/functions, although they are emacs-general. In particular, the key to making this whole thing work, appt-disp-window-function, has no help entry in my emacs, but this does it on my Linux: Solution Code (setq appt-display-format 'window) (setq appt-disp-window-function (function tsa/appt-disp-window)) (defun tsa/appt-disp-window (min-to-app new-time msg) (save-window-excursion (shell-command (concat "notify-send \"Orgmode: " msg "\"") nil nil))) Resources Relevant source: https://www.