How do I make iTerm terminal notify me when a job/process is complete? - macos

Question

A notification center notification would be ideal but growl, bounce dock, sound, etc would be fine, too (or if this can only be done in Terminal.app I'd be willing to switch back). Is there an option somewhere in iTerm to turn on notifications or is it something I'm supposed to type at the end of a command in the terminal? If the latter, is it possible to add an alert once process has started (for example if I realize it's going to take longer than I initially expected, I'm bad at guessing).

Answer 1

Notify on an already running process:
Edit → Marks and Annotations → Alerts → Alert on next mark
or Shortcut: ⌥⌘A
: iTerm will literally keep an eye (on top right corner) of your terminal. Once the command is finished, it will issue a notification.
Requirement: Shell Integration:
iTerm2 → Install Shell Integration
NOTE: integration will not issue notifications until iTerm2 is restarted.
Example Use Case:
We launched a command, underestimated completion time, and we don't want to cancel or just wait for completion.

Answer 2

And you can always use the say command.
Usually when you are running a long process inside the terminal and want to get updated you can simply use this command to speak out things like done or error or bazinga.
mvn clean install; say done
This command builds a java spring app, and takes a long long time, and it will speak out done after the process is complete.

Answer 3

You can add any one of the following after any command, with a semi-colon in between the command and it:
afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Ping.aiff -v 2
osascript -e 'beep 3'
tput bel
or, if you like Notification Centre
osascript -e 'display notification "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" with title "Title"'
You can also make an alias in your profile, called notify and add that at the end of your command. So, in your login profile
alias notify="tput bel"
then
sleep 10; notify
Or, if you started your command and it is "hanging", just type notify and hit Enter and it will run your notify alias at the end, whne the command has finished, e.g.
sleep 20
# wait 5 seconds before realising this will take 20 seconds
notify<Enter>

Answer 4

iTerm2 supports Growl notifications. You can turn it on in each profile settings.
Select a profile in Preferences…->Profiles.
Then in Terminal tab there is an option Enable Growl Notifications.
Remember to also enable iTerm notifications in Growl preferences.
If you want to get notification for a given process you could try to experiment with Triggers. You define triggers in Advanced tab in a profile settings. In this way you may assign a Growl notification to a particular output of your process (regexp).
You could for example do:
$ mycommand; echo "end-of-my-process"
And connect trigger to "end-of-my-process" message.
Update
Read more about triggers on iTerm2.com.

Answer 5

There is an OSS tool called noti.
You can easily install it with brew install noti and start using it just by prefixing your command with noti like noti sleep 3.

Answer 6

Install the iTerm2 shell integration
curl -L https://iterm2.com/shell_integration/install_shell_integration_and_utilities.sh | bash
Execute your command and concatenate the attention app, e.g.
./task && ~/.iterm2/it2attention once
It'll cause the iTerm app to bounce it's icon once the job is complete.
You also have other attention options:
$ .iterm2/it2attention -h
Usage:
it2attention start
Begin bouncing the dock icon if another app is active
it2attention stop
Stop bouncing the dock icon if another app is active
it2attention once
Bounce the dock icon once if another app is active
it2attention fireworks
Show an explosion animation at the cursor

Answer 7

You can also use terminal-notifier which use mac os system notifications. To install it via Home brew just:
$ brew install terminal-notifier
Then if you want to display notification when your job/process is done use something like this
$ <your job/process command> && echo 'Completed' | terminal-notifier -sound default
And this display like this:
You can also change sound and icon of notifications. More info in github repo: https://github.com/julienXX/terminal-notifier