It occurred to me that we often use colours in our terminals and code editors to highlight test failures, linting errors etc, but we don't typically use sounds. Has anyone integrated sound effects in any way?
Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#2I don’t, but I can imagine someone using them for events that may take a while (e.g. build ended, tests ended, deploy ended), or particularly if the event is a failure they have to respond to.
Xcode at least used to have sounds for “build failed” and “build succeeded”, and IntelliJ gives you notifications for build and test failures when the app isn’t focused.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#3From my perspective, this is unnecessary overhead.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#495% 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 function isn't written right" or "you mapped this array to an invalid return type" let me know exactly what I did wrong so I can fix it.
I don't think random beeps and dings and pewpews would have the same kind of contextual usefulness, and would probably be annoying and take me out of the zone whenever I'm focused and coding.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#5I suppose the Michael Winslow method doesn't count? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=robOb5F3sOk)
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#6 ping -aRe: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#7I used them when running some tasks. There's a shortcut for it in my dotfiles.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#8Sometimes when I wait for slow tasks to complete I do stuff like:
sleep 900; say "Task X is probably done now"
https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/gnustep-gui-common/say....
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#9No, I do the opposite. I keep my speakers muted when developing. I don't want sounds. But then, I'm also one of those weirdos who prefers not to use colors as well (they hinder rather than help me), so it may just be a personality thing.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#10Absolutely 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.