NOTE: This fork is solely for https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/manly-git/. Please see https://github.com/carlbordum/manly for the original project.
manly is a compliment to man pages.
It's a lot like explainshell (don't worry, that is explain-shell, not explains-hell).
Your good friend has a funky alias in his dotfiles:
alias alert="notify-send -i terminal -t 5 'Alert from Terminal!'":
$ manly notify-send -it
notify-send - a program to send desktop notifications
=====================================================
-t, --expire-time=TIME
The duration, in milliseconds, for the notification to appear on screen.
(Ubuntu's Notify OSD and GNOME Shell both ignore this parameter.)
-i, --icon=ICON[,ICON...]
Specifies an icon filename or stock icon to display.
Short and sweet!
manly supports Python 2 and 3
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/manly-git.git
$ cd manly-git
$ makepkg -si