Priority levels
Four levels, and the one that actually changes behaviour is whether the notification waits for you. High and critical stay on screen until you deal with them; low and normal fade like any other.
The four levels
| Level | Notification behaviour |
|---|---|
| Low | Fades on its own. Marked in the queue with a downward chevron. |
| Normal | Fades on its own. The default, and drawn with no marking at all. |
| High | Stays on screen until you act on it. One upward chevron. |
| Critical | Stays on screen until you act on it. Two upward chevrons. |
Set it in the composer behind More, from a reminder's row menu, or as a default for every new reminder in Settings → New reminder defaults.
What high and critical actually do
They ask your operating system to keep the notification on screen rather than dismissing it after a few seconds. That is the substantive difference, and it is the reason to use them: a reminder that fades while you are in another window is a reminder you did not get.
Your OS has the final say. Focus assist on Windows and Do Not Disturb on macOS can hold or suppress notifications regardless of what any extension asks for — see if notifications do not appear.
How it looks in the queue
A reminder that is not normal carries a small chip with the level's name on it, plus the chevrons. Normal gets nothing, so at most one chip appears per row and most rows have none.
It says the word rather than drawing bars, because a bar chart only ranks against other bars and a queue row has nothing beside it to compare to. The rank is in the chevrons as well as the word, and colour is a third channel rather than the only one.
Escalation
You can ask Latr to re-notify when a reminder at or above a chosen level goes unanswered: Settings → Notifications. Three numbers — from which priority upwards, after how many minutes, and how many times.
Four things about it are deliberate:
- It is ranked, not matched. A plan set for high also covers critical. You never have to remember to tick both.
- It replaces the toast rather than stacking. You get one notification that reappears, not a growing pile.
- Answering ends it. Clicking, dismissing or snoozing all count.
- It is capped at five repeats, whatever a settings file says. An uncapped one is an unbounded number of notifications about a single reminder.
A different sound per level
Using it without wearing it out
Priority works by being rare. If everything is critical, nothing is — you will start dismissing the persistent ones reflexively, and then the one that mattered goes with them.
A workable habit: leave the default at normal, use high for things with a real deadline you would be annoyed to miss, and keep critical for the handful per month that would actually cost you something. Low is worth having for the opposite reason — it marks the reminders you would happily see fade past.
Related: default reminder settings, per-site rules, which can set a priority automatically for sites you always treat the same way.
Something unclear, or something Latr does that this page does not cover? Tell us — the page is easier to fix than the confusion it causes.