Usage with herbe

i3-volume can be used with herbe notifications. herbe is a minimal, lightweight, daemon-less program for displaying on-screen notifications without the need for D-Bus. Setup is simple and straight forward and requires little modification to your i3-volume commands.

Example with PulseAudio

bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id $volumepath/volume -n -t $statuscmd -u $statussig -N herbe up $volumestep
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec --no-startup-id $volumepath/volume -n -t $statuscmd -u $statussig -N herbe down $volumestep
bindsym XF86AudioMute        exec --no-startup-id $volumepath/volume -n -t $statuscmd -u $statussig -N herbe mute

Example with amixer

bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id $volumepath/volume -an -i $volumestep -t $statuscmd -u $statussig -N herbe up $volumestep
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec --no-startup-id $volumepath/volume -an -d $volumestep -t $statuscmd -u $statussig -N herbe down $volumestep
bindsym XF86AudioMute        exec --no-startup-id $volumepath/volume -an -t $statuscmd -u $statussig -N herbe mute

Then reload i3wm with mod+Shift+r