[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev e...
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Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
It occurred to me that we often use colours in our terminals and
code editors to highlight test failures, linting errors etc, but we
don't typically use sounds. Has anyone integrated sound effects in
any way?
Author : jack_riminton
Score : 158 points
Date : 2024-09-12 09:24 UTC (4 days ago)
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I don't, but I can imagine someone using them for events that may
| take a while (e.g. build ended, tests ended, deploy ended), or
| particularly if the event is a failure they have to respond to.
|
| Xcode at least used to have sounds for "build failed" and "build
| succeeded", and IntelliJ gives you notifications for build and
| test failures when the app isn't focused.
| webgtx wrote:
| From my perspective, this is unnecessary overhead.
| solardev wrote:
| 95% of my work (web dev) isn't so much waiting for something to
| happen, where a notification of any sort would be useful. Most
| builds etc only take a few seconds, so I just wait.
|
| Most of the work is thinking through a problem, then ensuring
| it's coded correctly. The colors and syntax highlighting and
| squiggly lines and Typescript warnings etc (in Jetbrains) are all
| helpful because they are _contextual_. "Hey, this function isn't
| written right" or "you mapped this array to an invalid return
| type" let me know exactly what I did wrong so I can fix it.
|
| I don't think random beeps and dings and pewpews would have the
| same kind of contextual usefulness, and would probably be
| annoying and take me out of the zone whenever I'm focused and
| coding.
| grahamj wrote:
| Mostly agree but this does give me an idea: having a sound that
| indicates a change you just made to a line caused an issue with
| an offsceeen line. For example deleting the last usage of a
| variable declared higher up.
|
| Of course there are already onscreen solutions for that, such
| as indicators in the minimap, but it could be more obvious as a
| sound.
| solardev wrote:
| I agree, that would be nice. It could be like RTS games,
| where a narrator says something like "Your code is under
| attack" and there's a ping on the minimap pointing at the
| exact line.
| grahamj wrote:
| lol coding does feel like an RTS sometimes.
|
| Oh shit something broke over there!
|
| Crap I forgot to built something over here!
|
| Bah I knew I should have tested that!
|
| The deadline is approaching!
| wrp wrote:
| I suppose the Michael Winslow method doesn't count?
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=robOb5F3sOk)
| fragmede wrote:
| ping -a
| nicbou wrote:
| I used them when running some tasks. There's a shortcut for it in
| my dotfiles.
| cpach wrote:
| Sometimes when I wait for slow tasks to complete I do stuff like:
| sleep 900; say "Task X is probably done now"
|
| On Mac this works out of the box, AFAICT Linux has similar
| commands.
|
| https://ss64.com/mac/say.html
|
| https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/gnustep-gui-common/say....
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I do this, but I put it after terminal tasks like builds or
| test suites like task build; say complete
| hobabaObama wrote:
| thank you.
|
| Just created an alias
|
| alias waitfor='f() { sleep $1; say "Task $2 is probably done
| now"; }; f'
| voytec wrote:
| Why an alias creating a function and running it, instead of
| just defining the waitfor() function?
| function waitfor(){ sleep $1; say "Task $2 is probably done
| now"; }
| louwrentius wrote:
| I used this for my pipeline that deploys a fresly baked
| raspberry pi image onto an SD card. It would remind me to
| remove the SD card and put it in the Pi, boot it and have
| Ansible continue to configure it. Felt awesome.
| voytec wrote:
| I use something similar with an added "nagging" functionality.
| Surprisingly, it's easier for me to obey this thing, than
| nagging from an actual human being. nagme ()
| { [ "$#" -ne 2 ] && printf "usage: $0 [in_minutes]
| [text]\n" && return 1 printf "sleeping $1 min
| before telling you to $2\n" sleep "$(echo
| $1\*60|bc)" say "$2" > /dev/null 2>&1
| while : do sleep 30
| echo -n '.' say "I'm nagging you to $2" >
| /dev/null 2>&1 done }
| JohnFen wrote:
| No, I do the opposite. I keep my speakers muted when developing.
| I don't want sounds. But then, I'm also one of those weirdos who
| prefers not to use colors as well (they hinder rather than help
| me), so it may just be a personality thing.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Absolutely not. Cubicle farms are noisy enough as they are. The
| occasional beep from an ASCII Bel character is more than enough.
|
| I also surprise myself regularly by finding that I'm still
| wearing noise-cancelling headphones long, long after the Zoom or
| WebEx has ended. When I take the headphones off, I'm surprised
| again by how noisy the background is, particularly the howling of
| the ventilation system.
| freedomben wrote:
| Oh man, I'm jealous that you get cubicles. When I moved from
| Big Corp to startup land, I did not realize how much I would
| miss having a cubicle.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| Corps don't do cubicles anymore either, since the pandemic
| it's all open spaces with hot desks
| swah wrote:
| I bashed the cubicle 15 years ago - nowadays would kill to
| work with 2 more folks around, even if only a couple days a
| week.
|
| (Coffee shops don't really work for me...)
| leros wrote:
| Other than 3 hours where I modified git push to play "Push It" by
| Salt-N-Pepa before it got annoying, nope.
| croo wrote:
| One of my friends old office had speakers and every time Jenkins
| failed with a build it made a short sound. It was different for
| each project so everyone familiar with the sound would instantly
| know which project pipeline failed. He liked it and had fun
| choosing a sound effect fitting for his own project :)
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I sat next to someone who had a similar set up, except a robot
| voice also read out a summary of the failures.
|
| I moved desk within a few hrs.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| One place I worked at the success was a golf clap. The fail was
| crowd going 'awwww' as if someone had just missed a putt. Nice
| and simple. Since the build took 3-4 hours you did not hear it
| much.
|
| Before everyone went 'open office' it was semi fun to have
| sounds on different build actions. Now not so much :(
| vundercind wrote:
| There's... a particular sound pack that had those two sounds.
| Maybe different ones, sure, but this just unlocked a memory
| of two very particular sounds from my early Windows days.
| Might have been built-in, or maybe from Microsoft Plus.
| vunderba wrote:
| I don't personally but then again most of my work is not
| asynchronous in nature.
|
| A friend of mine has a TSR application that plays sounds to
| simulate as if they had a mechanical keyboard which they use with
| their laptop. So that's something.
| tsumnia wrote:
| I use a mechanical keyboard at home and I can absolutely see
| the 'tacking' sounds that it makes as a form of audio feedback
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| It isn't exactly what you have in mind, but I use `play` as well
| as a terminal theme color change to tell me when I'm using one or
| another language's keyboard layout. If you put & in front of
| play, you can make chords.
|
| Here's an example: # Define notes for major
| seventh chord starting on A 440 A=440
| C_SHARP=554.37 E=659.25 G_SHARP=830.61
| if [[ "$layout" == "Finnish" ]]; then # Play a major
| seventh chord ascending kitty +kitten themes --reload-
| in=all Apprentice & play -n synth 0.2 sine $A vol
| -30dB & play -n synth 0.2 sine $C_SHARP vol -30dB &
| sleep 0.2 play -n synth 0.2 sine $E vol -30dB &
| play -n synth 0.2 sine $G_SHARP vol -30dB & elif [[
| "$layout" == "English (US)" ]]; then kitty +kitten
| themes --reload-in=all Default & play -n synth 0.2
| sine $G_SHARP vol -30dB & play -n synth 0.2 sine $E vol
| -30dB & sleep 0.2 play -n synth 0.2 sine
| $C_SHARP vol -30dB & play -n synth 0.2 sine $A vol
| -30dB & fi
| Rygian wrote:
| I used the same approach when programming my fridge. If the
| compressor was required because the temperature in the topmost
| shelf was too high, the tones would play in rising order. If it
| was due to the bottom shelf, then the tones would play in
| descending order.
|
| I ended up disabling the feature because it was always the
| bottom shelf.
| slig wrote:
| Is your fridge on GH? Mine is outdated and I'd like to
| download a newer one.
| Rygian wrote:
| Short answer: no.
|
| Was forced to move to a new place. Had to buy a secondhand
| fridge. Thermostat was out of whack. Instead of calling a
| technician, I decided to have fun, replaced the thermostat
| by an Arduino with a couple of thermometers (top shelf,
| bottom shelf), a relay driving a contactor, and a beeper.
| Firmware stayed in "beta version", never thought about
| publishing it.
|
| When I moved again to a new place I ditched the
| frankenfridge.
| darknavi wrote:
| Projects line Frankenfridge are a blast until you want a
| product that "just works".
| AyyEye wrote:
| Most of my longest lived and lowest maintenance things
| were frankenprojects and brazen hacks that somehow lasted
| years without me having to make any changes or fix
| anything.
| hooverd wrote:
| Things work surprisingly well when you don't have an
| engineer or two figuring out how cheap you can go.
| vindex10 wrote:
| I bet it's written from an Apple device :)
| markhahn wrote:
| that project deserves a permanent web presence, if only a
| blog post!
| ghostpepper wrote:
| When I read that Finnish was a major seventh I was hoping that
| English would be a minor seventh or something even more subtly
| different. A minor 7th vs a minor 7 flat 5 etc.
|
| Would be funny to create an elaborate system of notification
| tones that are only discernible by a trained musician
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Forgive me Mr. Ghost Pepper. I didn't take the ear training
| seriously enough in AP Music Theory, and now I can scarcely
| tell my eleventh chords apart when I'm listening to Charles
| Mingus!
| left-struck wrote:
| > Would be funny to create an elaborate system of
| notification tones that are only discernible by a trained
| musician
|
| Oh man, could this concept be turned into an esoteric
| programming language where to program you use a musical
| keyboard and all the symbols in your lang are different
| chords or intervals
|
| Absolutely no visual feedback for extra pain
| madcaptenor wrote:
| This reminds me of the conlang "solresol"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol)
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Forking each sox command to the background causes samples to
| play non-deterministically and step over each other. Here's a
| better way: # Define notes for major seventh
| chord starting on A 440 A=440 C_SHARP=554.37
| E=659.25 G_SHARP=830.61 case "$layout" in
| Finnish) kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all
| Apprentice & play "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $A" \
| "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $C_SHARP" \ "|sox -np
| synth 0.2 sine $E" \ "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine
| $G_SHARP" \ vol -30dB 2>&- & ;;
| 'English (US)') kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all
| Default & play "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $G_SHARP" \
| "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $E" \ "|sox -np synth
| 0.2 sine $C_SHARP" \ "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine
| $A" \ vol -30dB 2>&- & ;; *)
| echo >&2 'Invalid $layout - must be "Finnish" or "English
| (US)"'; exit 1 esac
| memco wrote:
| Relatedly, I once saw someone realize that the sound they
| played at the end of their build was running synchronously so
| they were blocking themselves from a faster feedback loop and
| reporting unusually long builds in their profiling. Properly
| backgrounding the sound fixed their issues.
| marssaxman wrote:
| No - in fact I habitually leave my speaker muted, to prevent
| programs like Slack from distracting (and likely irritating) my
| co-workers in the office.
| girishso wrote:
| I play different wav files when compile fails or succeeds, so I
| don't need to switch to terminal from the editor. This in
| addition to Anybar(1) red/green icons.
|
| 1. https://github.com/tonsky/AnyBar
| al_borland wrote:
| Many years ago I had a manager who set a sound on our monitoring
| system to make a noise every time we got an alert. It went off
| non-stop and everyone started yelling at him until he turned it
| off.
| dgunay wrote:
| Only a little bit. I have VS Code configured to emit a small
| sound when a terminal command fails, or when a debugging
| breakpoint is hit. I also used to add `; say "tests are done"` to
| my test command so I could go to another screen and know when my
| tests finished.
| faizmokh wrote:
| I configured my Xcode behaviors to play a sound when a build is
| completed or when the test fails/passes.
| pawelduda wrote:
| https://github.com/kristiandupont/react-geiger
|
| This plays a click when React components rerender, to make you
| aware of the page performance
| jascha_eng wrote:
| This is so cool haha
| cal85 wrote:
| This one does the same thing but with beeps, with higher pitch
| for heavier DOM updates. It's not as nice as the geiger click
| but I've found it more useful for figuring out exactly where
| the UI is slow.
|
| https://github.com/tomhicks/react-audible-debug
| rgbrgb wrote:
| Cool! Found this little video of it in action
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM_DrpCK5i0
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| That's pretty nice and intuitive. The panning is heavy as
| expected, the emoji picker surprisingly quiet. But
| something is seriously wrong with the context menus.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I sometimes use say to alert me when a long running script
| completes. https://ss64.com/mac/say.html
|
| > doSomething && say "Finished!"
| pseudo_meta wrote:
| I sometimes use sounds as opposed to print statements when
| debugging automations or certain UI behavior, e.g. to indicate
| whether a certain if-condition was triggered or not.
|
| The advantage over normal print debugging is that you get
| immediate feedback, and do not need to switch to a console. This
| is also useful when it comes to debugging split second timings
| (custom window movement scripts).
| pimlottc wrote:
| You just gave me the idea for a tool that watches log files and
| plays sounds when certain patterns occur.
| RGBCube wrote:
| HELL YES!
|
| I actually did set my shell to spawn a background task to play
| the vine boom whenever I entered an invalid command.
|
| Something like command_not_found() {
| pw-play /opt/boom.opus & }
|
| And it actually improved my command accuracy by a lot. And it was
| super fun.
| wruza wrote:
| I buzz in ahk on timeout paths (e.g. dialog failed to show), also
| signal the end of lora training (half an hour+). Tried to voice
| over tsc -w errors, but that got old quickly.
|
| I work in automation so sending an IM in case something's wrong
| (or finished) is not a rare thing. May count as a sound too. I
| also shoot videos of everything a visual script does for debug
| (xvfb, ffmpeg).
| kleiba wrote:
| The dude in the cubicle next to mine used to use sound effects
| extensively, but he died a mysterious death a while ago...
| jcims wrote:
| Choked on a speaker?
| kleiba wrote:
| No idea what you're talking about...?!
| bubblesnort wrote:
| Terminals have supported a bell since terminals existed. The
| moment I hit tab on an interactive shell and it bleeps, I make
| sure it never does that again or my SO can't sleep.
| donatj wrote:
| In around the year 2000, for career day I went to work with my
| uncle. He worked in IT for General Mills. Their office was very
| much a stereotypical poorly lit IT cave in the basement.
|
| All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture
| sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer
| would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the
| tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly every action you could
| attach a sound effect to, they had. It would drive me insane
| trying to work like that.
|
| Tech culture is very different from what it once was.
| whatnotests2 wrote:
| Yes, this.
|
| Imagine an elevator, gas pump, vending machine, or laundromat
| emitting sound effects constantly.
|
| Quite the dystopian hellscape.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _gas pump_
|
| Most of them play advertisements while you fuel up. I hate
| it. The _only_ thing that I like about New Jersey forbidding
| me from touching a gas pump is that I 'm not subjected to ads
| for diarrhea medication or low-APR loans every time I fuel
| up.
| LgLasagnaModel wrote:
| Pro tip: on most pumps, the second button from the top on
| the right side mutes the volume.
| phs2501 wrote:
| A local station had (I think past tense, though it made
| it a lot less likely for me to go there to check) their
| pumps playing ads in "attract mode" when nobody was using
| them. So going there late at night and filling up
| involved listening to a poorly-timed round of "BUY NOW"
| utterances from eight different sources (because of
| course they weren't synchronized). And you couldn't
| really mute it because it was all the _other_ pumps.
|
| It was horrible.
| cdchn wrote:
| Great ready for the newest innovation, putting a small
| cellphone sized screen on the nozzle that you put into your
| vehicle. https://www.dekra.nl/en/smarter-nozzle/
| netsharc wrote:
| "This litre/ounce of petrol brought to you by LinkedIn.
| Synergize your career trajectory today!".
| panzagl wrote:
| Why must Maria Menounos yell at me while I pump gas....
| vundercind wrote:
| I've been doing an unfortunate amount of driving the last
| year, across a bunch of states, and have still only seen
| this at two or three stations ever. One of them in my home
| city, and I avoided that (conveniently-located) station for
| that reason.
|
| Maybe there are a few cities where it's a ton more common
| than most of the rest of the country.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > Most of them play advertisements while you fuel up
|
| I guess this must be a US thing. The only thing my gas pump
| shows is how much money I'm paying and that's it.
| thih9 wrote:
| There are pumps with ads in Germany[1], although not as
| annoying.
|
| [1]: https://www.threads.net/@twind.fotografie/post/C6f4n
| 28gdqY
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Just wait until they integrate the devices with AGI + TTS and
| either tie it to your ad history or one-click purchasing.
|
| AI Fridge: "We noticed you're almost out of cheese. Would you
| like to make your dairy extraordinary today with Tillamook
| Sharp Cheddar? Say OK to order now!"
|
| Enfleshened One: "No. Please self destruct."
|
| AI Fridge: "...Take that back, or I'll wilt all your
| lettuce."
| tanseydavid wrote:
| Enfleshened One: "Do as thou wilt."
| klausa wrote:
| >Imagine an elevator, gas pump, vending machine, or
| laundromat emitting sound effects constantly.
|
| This a non-that-inaccurate depiction of how life in Japan is,
| but thankfully one adapts quite quickly to that.
| boredtofears wrote:
| One of my first experiences with our home PC's was downloading
| wav files of movie and TV clips off of AngelFire and GeoCities
| sites and assigning different windows tasks to play them to
| prank my dad. Error dialog popup? Beavis and Butthead's
| "Breaking the law, breaking the law". Out of disk space? Johnny
| Mnemonic "I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head".
| He thought it was hilarious and would reassign them to his own
| clips that he found and we continuously tried one-upping each
| other to find the most annoying possible sound for every
| windows function.
| wormlord wrote:
| This could be kind of fun if done in moderation. Maybe a git
| hook that lets the creator of the PR select a song to play over
| the speakers when the merge request goes through. Some people
| might get pissed off, but I think it would be nice to have a
| bit more whimsy in software dev. As long as everyone is on the
| same page, should be fine.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I worked at a help desk one summer and every inbox had a
| different sound effect. We had several different external
| customers each with a dedicated machine to handle their
| tickets. The most critical customers (i.e. the biggest fines)
| got the loudest, most annoying sounds. Everything was an animal
| sound so the place literally sounded like a zoo on busy days.
| The manager absolutely hated bringing various big shot tours
| through our call center because of the ridiculous noise but we
| also had a perfect record.
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| I worked for a woman who had the Microsoft helper (like Clippy)
| but chose the cat avatar, and it would meow ALL day. It was
| funny for about 2 hours and unbearable beyond that!
| mtrovo wrote:
| Well, that's one way to get rid of open floor layouts.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| In my collection of CDROMs, I had one titled "Wired For Sound
| Pro" -- it was some custom software that could add sound
| effects to a ton of Windows events, as well as a huge library
| of sound files to attach to those events. I think products like
| this were to showcase "Multimedia PCs" that were starting to
| make it big in the mid 90s...
| shae wrote:
| I have both sounds and visual for process success or failure from
| the command line https://github.com/shapr/bloohm
| shae wrote:
| It kinda works on a keyboard also
|
| https://mclare.blog/posts/making-a-bloom-filter-keyboard/
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| In Olden Days (but recently enough it was retro) we borrowed a
| receipt printer from the front desk and printed the motd and jira
| tickets and fortune statements at random times
| snarfy wrote:
| I'm overloaded with notifications. I don't want any more.
| dvh wrote:
| I use short beep in all my inotify/rsync scripts to make sure
| that local file I just saved was finished uploading to server so
| I can refresh the browser.
|
| Another one is espeak that says "keyboard" when my keyboard get
| disconnected (usually due to me soldering stuff which then kills
| my keystroke monitoring keylogger which then I need to manually
| restart because it runs as root)
|
| On Upwork page a custom extension keeps continuously beeping when
| new message appears in chat.
|
| At 17:00 espeak says "17:00" to remind me it is time to make a
| soup.
| fabrik42 wrote:
| I use a sound effect to notify me about the exit of long running
| commands alias kk kk='say "ok! I am
| ready"'
|
| Usage sleep 10 && kk
|
| Not my idea, I found it years ago in some dotfile. But it is kind
| of handy if you run a long-running task in a terminal in the
| background.
| RhysU wrote:
| Peep:...
|
| Abstract
|
| Activities in complex networks are often both too important to
| ignore and too tedious to watch. We created a network monitoring
| system, Peep, that replaces visual monitoring with a sonic
| `ecology' of natural sounds, where each kind of sound represents
| a specific kind of network event....
|
| https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa00/gilfix/gilfix_ht...
|
| (not my work; that of a former co-worker)
| jelder wrote:
| Came here to say this. I remember seeing Peep on freshmeat.net
| back in the day, before SourceForge took it over. Seemed like a
| very cool idea and I played with it for a while, but my
| coworkers didn't care for it.
|
| Here's a recent discussion here on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017337
| bloopernova wrote:
| Instead of sounds to indicate the end of a long-running task, use
| a notification:
|
| https://github.com/t413/zsh-background-notify
| freedomben wrote:
| I noticed that gnome terminal has this built in. I normally use
| tmux, so the gnome terminal feature does not work for me since
| the command never finishes in the view of the terminal, but
| occasionally I'll fire off a command in a regular terminal
| window and will ReDiscover this. Pretty neat!
| upg1979 wrote:
| It reminds me of Extreme Feedback Device (XFD) lava lamps, pilot
| lights, and more.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > and more
|
| The best example of which being Retaliation -
| https://github.com/codedance/Retaliation
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Years ago we decided on gradles earlier versions. I added a sound
| effect to my machine for when it finished. I might have used a
| video game computer sound so that it sounded real and not super
| annoying to anyone nearby.
| leecarraher wrote:
| steve gibson of grc apparently uses sound as a second input
| channel to handle various tasks. as i recall he made an app
| decades ago called wizmo that allows you to script sounds, and as
| listeners probably recall, yabba-dabba-doo is one such audio
| channel input to let him know someone has made a purchase order
| on his website.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Decades ago I tweaked a toy raytracer I was messing with to make
| a click for every screen pixel traced. It made zero practical
| sense, but the result was _way_ cool nonetheless. Added another
| dimension to the rendering process and made it feel more
| tangible, if you will.
| drybjed wrote:
| This sounds like an idea borrowed from games or other media where
| doing certain actions results in an audible feedback. This is
| often done for the benefit of the audience, or to enhance the
| gaming experience, but I had an idea to implement this in my
| workspace to somehow influence my brain and make it more enticing
| to write code and somehow beat procrastination.
|
| I wrote a Python daemon which on startup loads small .wav files
| into memory to make latency as small as possible, and listens for
| interrupts as well as reads from a fifo. Other programs can send
| commands to it to play certain chimes on demand. In ~/.vimrc I
| added autocommands on certain actions - buffer write, enter/exit
| Insert mode, enter/exit command line, text change, etc. to send
| commands to my daemon. Now, when I use vim, I get audible
| feedback of my actions during writing. Since this is all in a
| separate daemon done in an UNIXy way, adding support for this in
| other applications should be easy enough if I want to.
|
| If there was interest, I think that I could clean up the project
| a little and publish it, including a set of free .wav chimes to
| use.
| mtoohig wrote:
| I am interested to give this a try if you share.
| joombaga wrote:
| Sounds cool. I'm definitely interested.
|
| Were you procrastinating when you wrote this?
| drybjed wrote:
| Maybe. :-)
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I would be very interested, potentially for future commercial
| purposes.
| joestrong wrote:
| Definitely interested
| yowayb wrote:
| I think I could use a sound when I switch modes in Helix. Thank
| you for looking into this!
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| Yes I'm very interested. I had exactly the same idea, but
| solved it using the "say" command and a random grab from a set
| of strings.
|
| I'm a Python dev and I'm happy to contribute to a project is
| you get it started.
| drybjed wrote:
| I'll set it up on GitHub in 1-2 days and publish it on Hacker
| News.
| benjaminoakes wrote:
| Related: Juice is the non-essential visual, audio and haptic
| effects that enhance the player's experience.
|
| https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Thank you for this fantastic link! Seriously. Bookmarked and
| planning to share. :)
| colechristensen wrote:
| The old SGI IRIX workstations had sound effects. (the OS is
| featured in the original Jurassic Park film with the very silly
| 3D file manager)
|
| It was literally like the hacker movies and predated most of
| them. Keystrokes, button presses, everything made a little
| noise. My first boss talked about the horror of the university
| computer lab full of them before they turned all the sounds off
| (as well as the absurd cost of outfitting that lab).
| drybjed wrote:
| With a daemon approach and clever integration within
| applications that handle missing fifo correctly, all you need
| to do to get rid of the sounds is just stop the service. And
| it's also configurable, so you can set what actions actually
| do produce sounds.
| picometer wrote:
| Count me in as interested!
| rpastuszak wrote:
| `$ ... && say 'Notice me father, I am complete'`
|
| (something I add to longer scripts when the job gets particularly
| boring)
| digitalsushi wrote:
| i tried d&d during the pandemic and was taught what 'flavor
| text' is. a dictionary of one to many flavor texts would
| benefit me using this pattern because i need randomness to
| break through the anticipation. in fact, mapping to posix exit
| codes would probably be the only case i'd use - give me 1000
| cute sayings for exit 0, and a dozen for 255, 1, 2, and a
| sensible default.
|
| preemptively, to anyone telling me this is terrible, i'd say
| this is a toy and a subjective one, but that we're detailing
| our personal flows here, and not inventing interfaces :)
| whatnotests2 wrote:
| This actually sounds like fun.
|
| A lot less "Las Vegas video slots parlor" because of the
| randomness.
| dylan604 wrote:
| say "The dishes are done man"
|
| however, turning off the damn bell in my terminal is a must. I
| hate whenever I'm trying to tab complete and it doesn't find
| anything and plays the bell. Hitting tab is instinctual for me,
| and I do it much more frequently than I would guess.
| oefrha wrote:
| I do. I have a small Swift HTTP notification service running on
| my dev machine, that uses SimplyCoreAudio to locate a specific
| speaker (so that notification sounds aren't affected by
| connecting headphones or speakers) and play a custom NSSound
| specified by the request. And I have all kinds of scripts calling
| that notification service on completion/error/specific conditions
| met from anywhere on LAN. The service also optionally shows a
| desktop notification dialog (through osascript
| app.displayDialog()) and/or send a Pushover notification to my
| mobile devices. Try it, it's a great way to wait for asynchronous
| tasks.
| witx wrote:
| yes
|
| > blacklist pcspkr
| digitalsushi wrote:
| in the late 90s i used a script someone made that would trigger
| callbacks on syslog patterns. there's different types of icmp
| traffic; i had iptables log the type that the ping command uses,
| and i played a submarine ping for each that my gateway received.
| i'm on the east coast usa, and i remember that i would get
| barraged with pings overnight, around 4am, as my ssh port got
| hammered simultaneously.
|
| its 25 years later and the thought of having a single
| discoverable element on the net scares me.
|
| i would really like an app that can create ambient music with
| composition: small songs that can overlay with harmony; if my
| network is running hot the baseline ramps up. if i have emails
| waiting, little tweets from a treble track that are fleeting but
| line up with the beat. there's so many ways i could use that
| soundtrack. plug it into the ide, errors in the buffer, subtle
| cues.
| n3t wrote:
| At a previous job we had a service that handled around 1 query
| per second.
|
| I crafted a oneliner that `tail -f`'d the logs and played a note
| for each response. I believe there were different notes for
| different HTTP status codes but it was years ago so the details
| flee me.
| _joel wrote:
| Interesting, could set the "bad" response codes to be in a
| minor keys and and "good" as major and feed that into a
| generative player. Listen to the stream and if it starts
| sounding moody and broody, check monitoring.
| _joel wrote:
| Yes, the system beep, although that just makes the terminal flash
| on my setup :)
| wanderingbit wrote:
| I made a small CLI pomodoro tool that both locks the screen and
| emits a chime sound when the time limit has been reached.
|
| https://github.com/Melvillian/pom-cli
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Yes! I play a "bonk" sound when a command in my terminal fails.
| Helps me break out of autopilot up-enter-up-enter loops that I
| can do accidentally. I wrote a blog post about it a while back:
| https://cgamesplay.com/post/2020/12/09/iterm-notifications/
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| If I am running a command that runs long enough such that my
| attention will drift but short enough such that I can't start
| something else, I'll append `echo "\a"` or equivalent. It's nice
| to know when the command completes.
|
| Loosely related, I am almost always running some white noise into
| my IEMs.
| Larrikin wrote:
| This is a feature built into warp, which is kind of nice.
| troebr wrote:
| On osx you can use `say "long command is done"` or whatever is
| descriptive.
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| I've tried it, and since I work remotely the voice is too
| surprising for me.
| frereubu wrote:
| I use this, which I use for exactly those kinds of scripts, but
| I don't really like noises:
| https://github.com/julienXX/terminal-notifier
| philsnow wrote:
| It sounds a lot like "auditory icons" as used in Emacspeak [0]
| and some other environments to improve accessibility for people
| with vision impairments.
|
| Bill Buxton [1] seems to have a good treatment of the subject but
| i don't know what's autoritative
|
| [0] https://tvraman.github.io/emacspeak/manual/Auditory-
| Icons.ht...
|
| [1] https://www.billbuxton.com/AudioUI06icons.pdf
| ElFitz wrote:
| For those interested, Xcode lets you configure sounds to be
| played when a breakpoint is reached. It can also be set up to
| conditionally play a sound.
|
| Those breakpoints can also be configured to continue running the
| app instead of pausing.
|
| It can quickly get out of hands though.
| e28eta wrote:
| It can be super useful for detecting the timing or relative
| ordering of code blocks. Something like "what order are these
| 2-3 methods called in and does it vary?" is so easy to hear as
| you navigate through an app.
|
| Or if you're doing something async / interactive / whatever,
| and don't want to stop the app, but do want to know when a code
| block executes.
|
| I wish it had more short & distinctive sounds to choose from
| though! edit: I think I found this project while working at a
| previous job, but haven't used it recently:
| https://github.com/matthewreagan/Xcode-Breakpoint-Sounds
| samatman wrote:
| I've avoided XCode thus far, but I'm going to have to see if
| there's a way to add this by Python scripting LLDB, because
| there are certain kinds of tracing where sound is probably the
| optimal medium. It's mind-numbing to try and catch unexpected
| orderings using printf debugging, and step debugging makes this
| worse not better.
|
| I'm thinking that for up to five events (which covers a lot of
| ground) this would be pretty sustainable with the pentatonic
| scale. Any combination of pentatonics is reasonably pleasant,
| and it would be very easy indeed to hear a permutation in the
| expected melody. I think this is something I could keep doing
| without suddenly developing an extreme aversion to it.
|
| It would still be necessary to use headphones to prevent
| casuals from being exposed, though. It wouldn't be _that_
| melodic...
| kqr wrote:
| I've long wanted to explore this. There are two ways one can go
| about it:
|
| - Airliner cockpits use certain audio signals deliberately and
| sparingly, to draw attention to important events.
|
| - Some systems naturally (or artificially) emit sound as a side
| effect of what they do, and this sound, while not signaling
| anything specific, is part of what allows the operator to build
| mechanical sympathy for the system.
|
| I think these two are completely different ways to use sound, but
| I imagine both could be viable.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Absolutely fucking not. My computer should make no sound that I
| don't explicitly ask it to make.
| criddell wrote:
| Well if you've configured your environment to use an audible
| alert for some condition, haven't you explicitly asked it to
| make the sound?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| If I don't explicitly control that condition, then I would
| say not.
|
| Something like "./run-long-task.sh; say 'Task is done'" is
| fine.
|
| An audible alert when an email arrives or a build fails is
| hell.
| dheera wrote:
| I would absolutely love an office where every time a build
| fails there is a big "womp womp" sound in the office coming
| out of that person's machine.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes. My computer can't even make a sound even if it wants to
| (no speakers connected). My phone has the same settings -- all
| sounds off, the exception is for turn-by-turn nav if I'm in a
| dense area, otherwise I just follow the blue line.
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| what is wrong with the top comments in this thread? Fastest way
| to get me to find an alternative software is to have it start
| beeping and whistling at me.
| gregalt wrote:
| Alam Turing used the "hoot" instruction on the Manchester
| computer in the 1940s to signal different things for debugging
| https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37507707
| criddell wrote:
| I've used the same sound effects for decades now.
|
| In Windows, open the Sound control panel page (type Alt-R then
| enter mmsys.cpl is the easiest way to get there) and on the
| sounds page there's a list you can scroll to see all the program
| events you can define sounds for.
|
| I use Visual Studio and play a Homer Simpson "Doh!" clip for
| build failed and a Fred Flintstone "Yabba dabba doo!" clip for
| build succeeded.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| Sometimes I'll add a chime to a long running build, eg `make ||
| aplay fail.wav`
| jafarlihi wrote:
| I have made sysm specifically for this:
| https://github.com/jafarlihi/sysm
|
| > sysm makes your system play custom sounds when any configured
| system or external event happens
| z3t4 wrote:
| When making my own editor I found one place where I wanted to
| have sound: When searching, and the search has reached the end -
| I added an auidble beep as well as a shaking effect.
| nprateem wrote:
| Yeah I sometimes say like BOOM or NIAAAOOOMM when I get things
| working
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| I have. You can assign sounds to stuff in IDEs, which I had some
| fun with in the early days of Visual C++.
|
| I was the tech lead on a project at a Big-6 consulting firm, so
| my friend and I set the team's machines up to point to wave files
| on the network for basic compilation events. Success, warning,
| error. And the Windows startup sound.
|
| This allowed me to change any of these sounds at any time,
| unbeknownst to the team. At some point, I changed the "build
| failed" sound to my own voice saying "That's crap!" It was
| amusing to hear this randomly coming out of this cube or that...
| especially my own, when I had a build fail and said "That's crap"
| right before my computer said it in the exact same intonation.
|
| Yeah... easily amused in the days of "Compaq Business Audio!"
| amelius wrote:
| I listen to the sounds of my code loading from my cassette tape
| drive. And my modem makes sounds too, when I'm doing stuff in the
| cloud.
| aendruk wrote:
| I've set my shell to discreetly play the sound of a mouse button
| click upon completion of any command that ran for longer than 20
| seconds. That choice of sound has the convenient effect that no
| one else seems to consciously notice it.
| dfansteel wrote:
| I once used the Xcode feature to play a sound when a breakpoint
| was hit. My EM had a conversation with me.
| daveddevx wrote:
| https://github.com/daved/shound
|
| Configurable to play a sound for any command you set (including
| not found). I've been using this or similar for many years and
| find the terminal to feel empty without it.
| swah wrote:
| Same, I was surprised to find out how hard it was to play a sound
| everytime the word ERROR appeared on my terminal.
|
| I even wanted to run a sound on the "positive case" ie a loop
| that is processing a few hundred items, could easily benefict
| from a subtle sound so you could feel when some request got
| hold...
|
| Like virtually all hardware does ie your vacuum cleaner has
| something stuck and is not operating at 100% etc.
|
| (I'm planning doing a "toy" terminal using a gamedev environment
| just to explore this a bit)
|
| edit: If you use Raycast you can just throw confetti from the
| command line too for extra dopamine: open
| raycast://confetti
| destructionator wrote:
| Use the ascii bell character "\a" and turn off the "visual
| bell" or whatever options in the terminal (I hate those things)
| so you can actually hear it beep and find joy.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Something I have often thought about for years but never
| implemented was "sound logging" where you get specific points of
| your code to play audio clips or tones instead of/as well as
| logging to console etc.
|
| The idea being that you can test the app.and hear the sound logs
| going off as you go. In a tight loop that executes quickly I
| would hope that you could hear something "being off" in the same
| way that a mechanic can hear if an engine is "running rough" etc.
|
| Of course... It might just be a totally inscrutable and useless
| wall of noise too! Won't know until I try it out
| knodi123 wrote:
| I definitely chain things like "make; say all done", then crank
| the volume and go make a snack. But that's probably not what
| you were referring to.
| tylerc230 wrote:
| Xcode has this functionality. You can attach a system sound to
| a breakpoint. I used it exactly once when I was trying to
| determine if two events always happened in the same order and
| were always equally spaced in time. It worked well but drives
| you sort of mad after a while.
| klausa wrote:
| One interesting way of using this I've heard of; is attaching
| it to a `-[UIViewController dealloc]`, and being able to
| "hear" (or rather notice the lack of sound) retain cycles
| this way.
| iosguyryan wrote:
| This is the way
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It could be useful but it would probably be very annoying and
| disharmonious unless it's very well designed. Would be cool and
| potentially very useful if somebody incorporated it in a good
| way.
| shtack wrote:
| This was my undergraduate "thesis" project. We built a GDB
| plugin that would generate a puredata audio structure to help
| with debugging. Eg. it would play snoring during a sleep()
| call, each breakpoint could be set to a different frequency,
| etc. It was actually pretty interesting for multi-threaded
| code, though pausing to play the audio could change the runtime
| profile.
| netsharc wrote:
| Makes me think of movie/TV computers that beep and bop, e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsP-kWvl1ds
|
| An out of place beep would probably be noticable.
| dennis-tra wrote:
| I had the exact same thought for years but never came around
| experimenting with it. I also hoped that one could eventually
| hear that something is off.
|
| I think this can happen by either recognising the "rhythm" in
| which sounds appear and/or recognising different tones.
|
| As a first step, my idea was to write a logger that plays
| different beep sounds for different log levels. That way you
| could mostly identify the "rhythm" because I guess most log
| messages would have the same severity. However, to a tiny
| degree also by the pitch of the sound.
|
| Then as a second step I thought of mapping the log message to a
| scale of sounds by e.g., hashing the message. This obviously
| would only work if there's no dynamic content in the message.
| puzzledobserver wrote:
| I recall seeing the following very neat idea on HackerNews some
| time ago, but can no longer find it:
|
| The idea, if I remember correctly, was to intercept system
| calls and play a sound every time one occurred. So you'd get a
| series of beeps every time the disk was accessed, somewhat
| similar to the spinning noise from HDDs. It would play a
| different type of noise every time the network was accessed,
| memory was allocated or freed, and so on.
|
| They reported that developers got pretty good at diagnosing and
| debugging their programs, purely from listening to it run.
| theultdev wrote:
| Yes, if it's frequent it becomes annoying.
|
| If it's infrequent you forget what it's for.
|
| I blare music when I code too, so that takes precedence.
| sc11 wrote:
| Matlab plays a sound on error by default (on some systems through
| the internal speaker, bypassing volume controls) and I always
| found it irritating.
|
| The only use case I see for them is something running in the
| background that takes a while and might get interrupted.
| wkoszek wrote:
| I don't use anything, but each time my eyes hurt, I wonder if I
| should: with some sense of music and tones, I often wonder if I
| could develop enough audio feedback to be able to do tasks like
| opening apps, writing, compiling, and getting feedback. I also
| often wonder if that is something that the visually impaired
| already use.
| BWStearns wrote:
| Sometimes if I'm running some long running task I'll do `; say
| finished` afterwards so I get pinged when it wrapped up.
|
| At once point I had a slightly more sophisticated command that
| would check the output and say completed or failed but it wasn't
| much more useful.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Everyone with a mechanical keyboard
| b800h wrote:
| One rather fabulous example I encountered had speakers rigged up
| to the wallboard that displayed pipeline info, and when someone
| broke the build, a clip of "Father Jack" from Father Ted
| profusely swearing was broadcast out across the dev room.
| anothername12 wrote:
| When I was a kid learning pascal, I used beep() debugging
| (similar to printf debugging)
| gorkish wrote:
| From [1] The story of PING: ping goodhost | sed
| -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder
|
| _He wired the vocoder 's output into his office stereo and turned
| up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there
| shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered
| through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound
| stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure._
|
| [1] <https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html>
| adrian_b wrote:
| That is like the beep for continuity testing that is provided
| by most electronic multimeters, which is very useful because
| both your hands and your vision are occupied with the tested
| equipment.
| throwanem wrote:
| Most _older_ DMMs. Modern ones synthesize a steady or
| intermittent tone in response to steady continuity. Older
| ones just use an instantaneous voltage threshold, which is
| much better for diagnosing an intermittent connection than
| the newer style, where the tone generator inadvertently does
| so much time averaging as to be useless outside steady state.
|
| I keep a 30-year-old Triplett around more or less just for
| this reason. My Fluke from 2019 is much better at everything
| _else_ , but...
| whalesalad wrote:
| macos has the "say" binary which is fun to play with for stuff
| like this
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| a billion years ago I piped say and some various noise files
| into ffmpeg to make audios that sounded like numbers
| stations, I don't think it would run anymore but it was a lot
| of fun :D
| nomel wrote:
| I did something similar for finding which outlet a breaker
| went to. I connected my MacBook to the outlet, airplay to the
| TV so it was loud, then had it yell if the power was
| disconnected: while ! pmset -g batt | grep
| 'discharging'; do; echo waiting; sleep 1; done; say
| disconnected
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Mac version, courtesy of chatGPT: stdbuf -oL ping
| news.ycombinator.com | grep --line-buffered -o "[0-9]* bytes" |
| xargs -I {} say "Ping {}"
| imperialdrive wrote:
| Love it! I use a similar Powershell script for testing
| cabling/changes. Laptop left on in middle of office with
| speakers turned up. So handy.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| Yes! I wish there were better tools for getting sound out of the
| terminal.
|
| I got bored waiting for long running scripts to finish one day
| and wrote this bash one liner.
|
| Now I can run a command and put a pipe and the zzz alias on the
| end and it will tell me when it's finished.
|
| > alias zzz='echo "zuhg zuhg\n" "work work\n" "lowk taar\n" "jobs
| done\n" "sawobu\n" "dabu\n" "i can do that\n" "be happy to\n"
| "OK\n" "no time for play\n" "my life for the horde\n" "what you
| want?\n" "master?\n" "dabu\n" "for the horde\n" "okie dokie\n"
| "hragh\n" "something need doing?\n" "ready to work" | shuf -n 1 |
| say -vRocko'
| elric wrote:
| Upvote for the excellent Wacraft II reference. Those are some
| of my favourite sound effects, and they are often quoted among
| my friends.
|
| Here's all of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gntGbsmTY_E
| aidenn0 wrote:
| And don't forget the last track on the CD:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWh1xy6gvU
| tuckerpo wrote:
| For very long local builds, like a full bitbake, I do `&& bell`
| so I know when to tab back to my build terminal.
|
| i.e. `bitbake bsp-vendor-full-image || beep && beep` so I get a
| sound when things finish, whether it failed or succeeded.
| tyrust wrote:
| I added an alarm to my prompt so it happens every time a
| command finishes. I only use a visual bell, which propagates
| through tmux and my window manager. So basically, if I'm
| focused elsewhere when a command finishes, I have a nice
| indicator reminding me to go back.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| I forget if this is a setting or on by default, but VScode will
| play a sound when a task is finished running, and it's different
| based on whether the task succeeded or failed. I use this so that
| I can leave long running jobs (usually testcases) running and not
| have to keep checking on the status.
| elric wrote:
| I once configured a Jenkins instance to play different sound
| effects when certain builds would fail. Originally these were
| played out of our big office TV, but its speakers broke at some
| point. A few years later, a couple of new hires came up to me to
| tell me they thought their laptops were infected with malware,
| because it would sometimes make weird noises. Turns out they had
| Jenkins open in a browser tab, and it would play the sounds when
| builds broke.
| eastbound wrote:
| Lots of generational differences here: A opened the build while
| I'd just wait for the email in case of failure. Second, they
| kept it open, which in my time I wouldn't have (Perhaps you
| neither, which would explain why you never noticed).
| frereubu wrote:
| My first thought was some kind of 16-bit sound when you open and
| complete different brackets, perhaps a different sound for each
| depth, but I imagine that would become annoying pretty quickly!
| TZubiri wrote:
| Yes, here are some of my scripts:
|
| gcc hello_world.c ; beep -f MICROWAVE_DING_FREQUENCY
|
| gcc hello_world.c 2> /dev/snd
|
| ./hello_world xargs -I {} curl -X POST
| "https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/speech" \ -H "Authorization:
| Bearer sk-Ajs7aNsa8dJa5dr8jS4xManJ6V9xIjk" \ -H "Content-Type:
| application/json" \ -d '{"model": "tts-1", "text": {},"voice:
| "echo"}' > /dev/snd
| relwin wrote:
| Unshielded embedded systems generate RF noise that can be
| received on AM/FM radios. Some devs figured out which processes
| generated which noises and could determine what the system was
| doing, or if a loop was taking too long just by listening.
| dghughes wrote:
| What about smells? Scent is a powerful tool for recalling
| memories.
| MrHamdulay wrote:
| There is React Geiger which makes geiger counter noises on render
| [1].
|
| Easy to tell when you have messed up and re-rendering tons
| unexpectedly.
|
| [1] https://github.com/kristiandupont/react-geiger
| racl101 wrote:
| I use the say command on MacOS for a few things.
|
| That command is a kinda fun. One time I had it read out to the
| lyrics to "Fitter Happier" using the Fred voice.
| zffr wrote:
| I sometimes use sound to notify me when long running tasks
| finish. On macOS you can do this by doing "long_command; say
| done;"
| tacon wrote:
| In the depths of the pandemic, James Shore ran a Tuesday TDD
| Lunch & Learn livestream. He based everything around TDD with an
| audio addition to the red/green display. Here is an example of
| the sound:
|
| https://youtu.be/nlGSDUuK7C4?list=PLD-LK0HSm0Hpp-OspFpZ32uY7...
|
| I really like the gentle audio feedback with TDD, so I took the
| sounds from James' bespoke TDD harness and added it to my jest-
| audio-reporter.
| Gregam3 wrote:
| At one point I had my partner scream "breakpoint" and recorded
| it, it then played from my ide whenever a breakpoint was hit so I
| would swap back to that workspace and continue working.
|
| But it got extremely annoying within a few days as you could
| imagine
| busterarm wrote:
| Almost 20 years ago, Ang Cui and I were bullshitting and
| brainstorming around an idea he had to categorize patterns in
| network traffic as audio tones so that one could listen to
| network traffic flow.
|
| He has since gone on to do other, bigger things and I'm still
| sitting here kicking myself for not at least pursuing the idea a
| little.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I'm moderately interested in audio feedback indicating
| performance behaviour. Maybe memory allocation or syscalls. Page
| faults. Something to play during unit tests or similar and give
| some indication of things going wrong. Not interested enough to
| implement it yet.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Yes, if I have a long running script in Jupyter I run a cell
| right underneath containing
|
| !say "done"
|
| And turn my speakers up.
| gknoy wrote:
| I have a shell alias that I use sometimes when running long-
| running test suites locally, or doing some long task that is
| blocking my work (building Docker images, installing libraries).
| It echoes something for the shell, shows a success/failure image
| in the terminal, and playes an audio clip (loud and annoying ;))
| when tests pass. The only way I could make it better would be to
| play a sad trombone on failure: # e.g. pytest
| tests/test_foo.py && SUCCESS alias SUCCESS="echo -e
| '\n\nSUCCESS' \ && bash -c 'mpv
| ${media}/kazoo.mp3 &' \ && imgcat
| ~/Pictures/success.png \ || imgcat
| ~/Pictures/fail.png"
|
| It's useful because I can hear that the task is done while I'm
| reviewing a PR, or reading documentation, or loading the
| dishwasher.
| ozim wrote:
| Not sure if more people have that but I hate sounds. I turn off
| all system sounds on my OS. I turn off all notifications on the
| phone.
|
| It is not like I get called often but still had bad memories from
| former work where everyone had the same phone and the same sounds
| and I was often working 24/7 support. Hated that work and hated
| my morning wake up alarm that I had to change every couple months
| because each one I hated more and more the longer I used it.
|
| I love melodic music and also any sounds not aligning to melody
| or rhythm are super annoying for me especially if I get into the
| flow.
| lowdownbutter wrote:
| I can't help envisioning such a thing with *Command and Conquer*
| announcer or *Warcraft 2* peasants.
|
| "Building ..." "Cancelled" "Unable to comply, building in
| progress" "Construction complete" "Cannot deploy here"
|
| "Job's done"
|
| etc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW1qfrx_Lg8
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoMhMZZjbGg
| Fergusonb wrote:
| I love this idea.
|
| YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYTHONS
| valbaca wrote:
| for very long builds, I'll simply add `; say "build done"`
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| No. I also don't listen to music.
|
| I do, however, use colors, and the GUI over CLI, whenever
| possible.
| shiomiru wrote:
| Programmer preferences really differ, don't they... I listen to
| music, don't use colors, and prefer CLIs over GUIs. I also like
| my BEL to beep.
| benterix wrote:
| Yes! I used it a lot with CDK as all the process was usually
| quite long so I switched to doing other things and a nice sound
| would tell me the synthesis went fine whereas a "broken glass"
| sound would mean I need to do better.
| iamwil wrote:
| I sometimes do (on my mac)
|
| `some_long_running_script; say "done with the script"`
|
| and it'll say the line when it's done, whether there's an error
| or whatever. so I know to check.
| Kozmik1 wrote:
| The classic audio diagnostic on Linux/Unix is some beeps
| occurring and kernel debug text on all virtual terminals when
| something really horrible has gone wrong.
|
| If you want to make a beep in a linux console, try adding this to
| your shell scripts. It should trigger the default system "beep"
| sound. I used to include this in my scripts that ran really long
| tests or cluster jobs to wake me up and check the results.
|
| Sadly, on many laptops and PCs today, there seems to be no action
| on the PC speaker at all, but you can configure this system beep
| code to trigger a sound of your choice from your favorite gui
| console application.
|
| In Python I believe you can trigger the system 'beep' sound with
| one of the following: print("\a") # cross platform print('\007')
| # linux only
|
| My gui favorite, Konsole does not make any sound using these
| standard methods unless you manually configure it to play a file
| for "Bell in focused session" under Notifications. Of course this
| plays a wav/ogg file instead of triggering the PC speaker.
|
| It can be really hard to make a little beep these days, when you
| consider you may have 4 different sound outputs (one for each
| display and video card, one or two for the motherboard),
| application specific audio levels that get set to quiet or muted
| by default arbitrarily, and then application specific opt-ins
| needed just to support a little sound that was kind of a failsafe
| notification in earlier times.
| Kozmik1 wrote:
| I remembered as I enabled this great setting, that I am usually
| very quick to turn it OFF because it causes the configured
| sound to play when you hit backspace at a blank prompt, which I
| tend to do when I'm thinking of what to type, or clearing
| lines, I just hit backspace excessively for fun. Unfortunately
| the bell causes me to get penalized for that, so I will
| probably disable it again.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I used to do this as a data scientist. Sometimes training jobs
| would take an awkward amount of time like 30 minutes or an hour
| and I'd get sidetracked doing something else. So I just had it
| beep when it was done like an oven. Prevented me from having to
| check back every now and then or missing an email. We didn't have
| good chat integration back then.
| Animats wrote:
| Once, Apple had Sonic Finder.[1] It was kind of cute. Especially
| the part where the sound for dropping something in a move was
| deeper for a larger object.
|
| [1]
| http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/~ben/references/gaver_the_son...
| Dowwie wrote:
| it would be hard to hear it over the roar of my mad typing on a
| mechnical keyboard
| stusmall wrote:
| I remember I was screen sharing while troubleshooting something
| at a new job. I hadn't really set up my mac, and most everything
| was still defaults until I got a working build/deploy. One of the
| founding engineers said "You should turn bells off on your
| terminal. If [the CTO] sees that, he will give you so much shit."
| I should have taken that weird but ultimately innocent
| interaction as a sign that I was walking into an absolutely
| insane environment.
|
| It's a tangent, but the bell character is a left over from how
| people used to do what you are asking for. Your question just
| reminded me of that strange conversation and harsh reaction.
| serced wrote:
| In the previous startup I worked at, we set up a PR action that
| played a celebration thingy after every PR merge. We used
| https://github.com/leokster/dingdong_sonos to play on the Sonos
| speakers. Fun little gimmick but not really as a usecase like
| colors for linting etc.
| mleo wrote:
| I find default calendar notifications useless. They pop-up 15
| minutes before the meeting so they get dismissed, out of site,
| out of mind. With an integration of Keyboard Maestro, iCalbuddy,
| Stream Deck and modified shell script I show the upcoming meeting
| on a Stream Deck key.
|
| Stream deck key shows time of next meeting, how long until that
| is, with background colors changing as it approaches, and how
| many meetings remain for the day.
|
| For the sound effect portion, at 1 - 2 minutes prior and at the
| meeting time, a sound effect is played giving me the heads up
| that a meeting is starting. Also at 1-2 minutes prior to meeting
| starting, the Sonos speaker in the office announces the meeting
| subject.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| VSCode is adding sound as an accessibility feature. I am
| personally not in need of this feature (yet), so I notice when
| they surprise me with a new sound for a new event turned on by
| default.
|
| I think I could find value in adding sound to my dev environment,
| iff there were a quick and easy way to sample and select from
| collections of sounds made for this purpose.
|
| As it stands, if I don't like the sound chosen by the audio
| accessibility group, I just turn it off because there's no UI to
| change it.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| My suggestion for anyone wanting to try this is to use small
| bleeps that don't get annoying over time. I use some retro game
| sounds by cabled mess[1].
|
| [1]
| https://freesound.org/search/?q=Retro+Video+Game+sound+effec...
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| When some repetitive task (rebuilding a program, running tests,
| ...) tend to last more than 30 seconds, I like to make it beep
| when it's done so I can do something else and not get carried
| away and loose some precious time on my #1 priority goal.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Sure. I've used `say` on macos (spd-say for linux) like so:
| mvn clean install ; say "Done"
|
| It's great for those build times that're awkwardly long. Just
| long enough that you get bored waiting, too short to accomplish
| something else in the meantime. So you crank up the volume, load
| up HN, read an article and "DONE!" OH HOLY SHI--. Back to work.
|
| that said it sucks to set up that flow when you /sometimes/ are
| around other people. it's pretty jarring if anyone can hear it,
| so you just wouldn't do it in a tight-collab area.
|
| Usually though they're SUPER annoying so eventually I weeded them
| out of my workflow.
|
| Would not recommend using sounds in development.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I used to have an intellij plugin that would make a sound when
| there was a regix match in the terminal. It was extremely useful,
| I had it set to make a sound when a build was complete, or there
| was a compilation error.
| mellosouls wrote:
| I use a pomodoro app that pings when time is up and ticks for the
| duration if sound is on.
|
| One constraint on frequent sound use is you can only really use
| them in either a solo environment or with headphones without
| being antisocial; which is probably a contributory reason to it
| not being a significant presence in modern development.
|
| I suspect it was a more common thing in the beginnings of home
| computer use (80s onwards) when creating and controlling sound
| was immediately available from the command line before
| programming got abstracted away to a secondary level.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My dad used to work long hours at a startup where the build-times
| were non-trivial. He setup his build to echo infinite ^G
| characters (i.e. the terminal bell) when it finished and would
| nap while it was building.
| analogwzrd wrote:
| Definitely need to add a _womp womp_ on a compile error
| joeld42 wrote:
| I've heard of using "Geiger counter allocators" -- custom
| allocators that make a small click whenever an allocation happens
| to get a sense of when a program is doing lots of allocations,
| especially lots of small allocs, as it's running.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I once had a very boring job with long compile times. I played a
| sound at the end of the build script, because otherwise I would
| just start goofing off and not doing anything.
|
| (I quit shortly after that.)
| n0n0n4t0r wrote:
| For long running scripts, I like to finish them With something
| like `say "wake up lazy bastard`. My previous employer has a wiki
| full of procedure containing this kind of easter egg. (I knew the
| founders and it made them laugh, so no issue there)
| picometer wrote:
| A while back I prototyped (very roughly) an auditory equivalent
| to "syntax highlighting", using ambient tones and white noise,
| rather than discrete beeps/sound effects. [1]
|
| I'm actually revisiting this project right now! I'm
| reimplementing it in Rust and also exploring different ways to
| communicate parser state and other contextual information through
| sound.
|
| [1] http://marycourtland.github.io/AuralJS/
| maniatico wrote:
| I configured Visual Studio to play sounds if a compilation
| succeeded or failed (to wake up if it's taking too long). I also
| configured it to play a sound if a breakpoint is hit (quite
| useful if you are debugging a game and some assert you don't care
| triggers)
| Jenk wrote:
| Continuous testing tools would make good use of audio. It's been
| a minute since I have been in need of such a tool, but I could
| appreciate differentiating sounds for passed/failed.
| eastbound wrote:
| Yes. I've modified maven so that it says "Success" or "Error"
| (with the command `say` of macOS). It's very useful when you have
| a build of 30-50s that you execute dozens of times a day.
| dpedu wrote:
| MacOs ships with the `say` command and once in awhile I'll do
| something like `longRunningProcess ; say its done`, but not
| beyond that.
| hackmiester wrote:
| I use `ping -a` so that when the host comes up, my terminal will
| beep.
| josefdlange wrote:
| When I've had longer-running test/lint suites in the past, I've
| added simple sounds to the ends of their run scripts (birds
| chirping for success, alarm blare for fail) that help me draw my
| attention back. I had an issue where I would go off and read the
| news, or social media, or whatever, when running my tests, then
| suddenly it would be twenty minutes later and not only would I
| have wasted fifteen minutes, I'd have forgotten what it was I was
| even doing...
| qrush wrote:
| I've set my Slack notifications to the "Hummus" sound instead
| because it's a lot less stressful and funny. Yes it's on your
| Slack too. Join me in chickpea silliness.
| secret-noun wrote:
| Example of the sound:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agShdo4yxxA&t=36s
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I make them myself
| gravitronic wrote:
| In highschool my friend wrote a mIRC script that waited in our
| city's DALnet channel for someone to announce they were *\f\\(our
| city), and would DM them hello, start a conversation and if they
| responded the script would announce "babyfaceangel16 is female".
|
| He'd turn it up and go play N64, and occasionally his computer
| would announce he's in a conversation with a girl so he'd drop
| the controller and pick up the conversation.
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