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/
Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
71–80 of 336 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#72[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#73If 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.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#74In 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 eve…
Yes, this.
Imagine an elevator, gas pump, vending machine, or laundromat emitting sound effects constantly.
Quite the dystopian hellscape.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#75[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#76One 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 :)
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 :(
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#77`$ ... && say 'Notice me father, I am complete'` (something I add to longer scripts when the job gets particularly boring)
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 t…
This actually sounds like fun.
A lot less "Las Vegas video slots parlor" because of the randomness.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#78It 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 kit…
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
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#79It 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...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#8095% 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 fun…
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.
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.