I have been building a few things that take a while to compile *cough*llvm*cough* and started using growl to let me know to stop reading hacker news and go back to doing something useful.
$ make ; growlnotify -m "All done!"
Then it dawned on me, I should make some aliases. I made two: Yay, for when things were happy to finish. Boo for when I didn’t want something to stop.
I put this in my .bash_login:
alias yay="growlnotify -m Yay!"
alias boo="growlnotify -m Boo!"
Now when I run make I can just do a make ; yay and it will cheer when it is done. Likewise if I am running one of my deamons that is not supposed to stop running (aka crash) I will do a server ; boo.
It’s like decorating the homely terminal with some pretty golden growl messages. Suddenly everything is pretty!
This assumes you have growlnotify installed, which can be found on the growl install disk image.