OSX Mavericks - keyboard shortcut to kill notifications

Question

Is it possible to create a keyboard shortcut in OSX Mavericks to kill/hide notification center alerts (and speed up hiding banners that already disappear after some time automatically)?

EDIT: I used Terry's "nuke all" AppleScript (which has the added benefit of not throwing errors if notifications don't exist), saved to Documents and Compiled, then moved it to Library/Scripts/ and downloaded a free copy of FastScripts to assign a keyboard shortcut.

Answer 1

This used to work:

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "NotificationCenter"
        click at {2500, 50}
    end tell
end tell

But in Mavericks it gives me "System Events got an error: Can’t make {2500, 50} into type list." I finally found a fix, though:

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "NotificationCenter"
       click button "Close" of window 1
    end tell
end tell

That closes the bottommost notification, which is good enough for me.

Also handy is this script to nuke 'em all:

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "NotificationCenter"
        set numwins to (count windows)
        repeat with i from numwins to 1 by -1
            click button "Close" of window i
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

Answer 2

You can use a script like this to click a notification:

tell application "System Events" to click window 1 of process "NotificationCenter"

It closes both banner and alert notifications that don't have a default action, but it performs the default action (like opening App Store for the "OS X Updates Available" notifications) if a notification has a default action.

Answer 3

I have an option, which uses Keyboard Maestro to run an Applescript and is detailed here: http://genuinecuriosity.com/unnotify

I have it mapped so that I hit [Command]+[Option]+[0] to clear all open alert dialogs.

Basically, I have created an Applescript to click the first button on all open alerts (typically Close), and does that until all alerts are cleared.

You can use the Applescript directly through Keyboard Maestro (as described in my article), or you can create a Service with Automator (this is a little more finicky due to Accessibility permissions requirements). The full Applescript is included in the article, along with a screen grab showing the setup in Keyboard Maestro.