If you've got a ridiculously good memory and you've been reading my writing for a while, you know I'm a fan of processes notifying you when they are done. I often have some task running in a hidden terminal that performs actions when files change. This is most often running Clojure tests whenever a file changes using either test-refresh or lein-autoexpect. Another common watch task is rendering this website whenever one of the markdown files changes.

I don't like needing to have these processes always visible, since I mostly only care about when they finish. When running unit tests, I don't need to see the output unless a test is failing. When writing articles, I only care about when the rendering is done so I know I can refresh my browser to review the output.

On macOS, one way of doing this is using terminal-notifier. terminal-notifier makes it trivial to send notifications.

Below is the script I run while working on this website. It uses entr to monitor the input files; when changes are detected, it renders this site using my homegrown Babashka static site generator, and when that finishes, it uses terminal-notifier to alert me.

#!/bin/bash
while sleep 0.5; do 
    rg bb templates source --files -t css -t clojure -t markdown -t html \
        | entr -d -s 'rm -rf output/*; bb render && terminal-notifier -message "Rendering complete"';
done

This site renders quickly, so I can usually make some edits, save, and toggle to a browser to refresh and see the output. Still, it is nice to see that little notification pop-up on my screen so I know for sure that if I hit refresh, I'm seeing the latest render.

When I'm running my Clojure tests, both lein-autoexpect and test-refresh send a notification with a pass or fail message based on the status of the unit tests that just ran. If the tests are passing, I don't have to glance at my terminal. If they are failing, I do.

I'd encourage you to think about what processes you might want to get notifications from when they are done and look into how to set that up. terminal-notifier works great on macOS. I can't make recommendations for other operating systems since it has been years since I've used any alternatives besides SSHing into a Linux server.

It is worth the effort to figure out how to have notifications. They remove a trivial inconvenience (having to switch programs, needing to keep a window visible on your screen) and make life a little better. By stacking small, slightly life-improving techniques, all of a sudden you find yourself much more productive.