Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#261

Post by aleksiy123 » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 1:29 AM UTC

Fergusonb wrote: post #240

lowdownbutter wrote: post #183

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

I love this idea. YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYTHONS

Ugh I want this now.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#262

Post by chrisguilbeau » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 1:53 AM UTC

Late to the party, but I have a script called zbeep that takes command and args as arguments. Makes a sound before starting execution and has success and fail sounds. It’s great for those 5-10 min processes. For long stuff I have a similar zslack command.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#263

Post by shireboy » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 1:54 AM UTC

Visual studio plays a >donk< on test or build failure and a ding on success. I have a habit of switching away to another project or hacker news while tests run, so this is extremely useful for me.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#264

Post by imron » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 1:55 AM UTC

> Has anyone integrated sound effects in any way?

Terminal bell rings every time I press escape more than once in vim :-)

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#265

Post by ungamedplayer » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 1:57 AM UTC

Kozmik1 wrote: post #195

Kozmik1 wrote: post #190

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…

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.

Surel backspacing beeps at the empty prompt can be turned off. I feel like I do it all the time.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#266

Post by paragraft » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:02 AM UTC

I've used it in anger on a project with an unreasonable start time in its test suite. Put an alert sound on VS when breakpoints were reached let me start a test with debugger attached, and then go do something else for the time it would take to start, but not forget what I had been originally doing.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#267

Post by lieks » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:06 AM UTC

I used to work at a company where running the full test suite took about 10min on my local machine. I would often run

    ./test.py; beep

where beep is a script I made that plays the Macintosh boot beep[1]. It was pretty useful.

I also did something similar that one time I had to compile LLVM (~4h on my laptop) and that other time I had to compile Firefox (~6h on same laptop).

[1]: https://ieks.cc/articles/mac-beep.html

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#268

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:06 AM UTC

I suppress all the sound effect alerts Windows makes. They're not helpful, just annoying.

But when debugging real time software, where instrumenting the code breaks it, I would have the code run an instruction that toggles the speaker state. By the tone it makes, I can infer what's happening.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#269

Post by xaellison » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:08 AM UTC

I worked for a company where the main workflow was to download an entire postgres dump at the start of the day and work off that. It took 25 min. I aliased our download command to play run a profane version of `say "beep beep"` after it finished. Then one time it spoke up during our stand up and everyone heard. It got more polite thereafter.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#270

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:08 AM UTC

gorkish wrote: post #132

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/~m…

That's the kind of engineer I like to work with!