Undistract-me “Terminal Job Notifications”

What if you could get notifications when a task is completed on on your terminal. A small push notification indicating that the command has been executed or a sound would be produced when the terminal has finished a command on Linux. That could end up saving both money and time of yours.

CHECK Top-Right corner …..Cool right ?

We have all faced one thing while working on something both personally and professionally, that is distractions. Distractions everywhere. A programmer sometimes just needs to be in his/her zone, his/her level of peace to work at a peak level . But a certain YouTube video that you got to check out. Or a Facebook comment that you should reply to takes it away…

Suppose you run a task which gonna take some time on the terminal and now you find this amazing 7 minute Ted talk video ( your brain goes : why not) in the meantime that task has already finished and the terminal is waiting for the next step. The uses of this could be endless.

Installation

So, you sold ? Cool. Now there might be many possibilities to this like NotiFrye, issuing another command after the it’s completion by using ; But here I will give you the simplest way to achieve this without the bells and whistles. Also I will provide links of all other ways to do this on different distros if this doesn’t work out for any reason.

For Linux 16.04, enter in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install undistract-me

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:undistract-me-packagers/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install undistract-me

if ! [ -z "$BASH_VERSION" -o -z "$PS1" -o -n "$last_command_started_cache" ]; then
  . /usr/share/undistract-me/long-running.bash
  notify_when_long_running_commands_finish_install
fi

Easy enough but one more thing

• for GNOME Terminal: select Edit > Profile Preferences and on the Title and Command tab, check the “Run command as login shell;
• for Guake Terminal, right click in a terminal, select “Preferences” and on the General tab, check the “Run command as a login shell” box.

 Customization

• Undistract-me now runs only when the terminal window is not active which is the true purpose of it. Example : It only shows you the notification when the terminal windows is minimized or not active (at top of the screens)

• Undistract-me doesn’t denote completion notification for small commands like cd or ls which would be quite irritating. Instead **It only shows notification for command longer than 10 seconds only.** To customize this as per your requirement, follow.

 edit the /usr/share/undistract-me/long-running.bash file as root and changing the LONG_RUNNING_COMMAND_TIMEOUT variable value from 10 to whatever you want.

• It is possible to disable notifications for certain commands by adding them space-separated to LONG_RUNNING_IGNORE_LIST variable.
• There is a way to play sound on notification in it too. Refer here

One last thing

For sound, I prefer to go the extra mile

sudo sed -i 's/blacklist pcspkr/#blacklist pcspkr/g' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
sudo modprobe pcspkr
beep [optional parameters]

OR

 foo; spd-say done

Replace foo with whatever command you want to use.

and make your day a little more productive. I am gonna go watch my Ted video now.

Other ways and for other environments :-

https://github.com/kaustubhhiware/NotiFyre

Growl for macOS ( untested )

Arch – https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/undistract-me-git/

Tilix – Tilix is an advanced GTK3 tiling terminal emulator that follows the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.And offers notifications when the screen is not active. Available for most distros.

Sources :

https://github.com/jml/undistract-me

https://launchpad.net/undistract-me

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Footnote

You put commands here to set up the shell for use in your particular environment, or to customize things to your preferences. A common thing to put in .bashrc are aliases that you want to always be available. We are here putting an alias in the bash file.