Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 336 posts

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

#53

Post by leecarraher »

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.

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

#54

Post by huhtenberg »

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.

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

#55

Post by freedomben »

bloopernova wrote: post #47

Instead of sounds to indicate the end of a long-running task, use a notification: https://github.com/t413/zsh-background-notify

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!

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

#56

Post by drybjed »

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.

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

#58

Post by freedomben »

bediger4000 wrote: post #10

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.

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.

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

#59

Post by oefrha »

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.
Post reply on HN