How to get a notification from actions on a remote host?

[carloscabanero]

How do I get a notification when a command has completed? How do I ring the bell?

[carloscabanero]

Blink Shell comes with standard OSC sequences support. You can test it by pasting the below command into the terminal.

echo -e "\033]777;notify;Blink Shell;Hello form Blink Shell of the notification\a"

You should see a notification like this one.

Notifications will work on remote servers over ssh, as long as you are connected to the server, but aren't supported in Mosh and by default in tmux. To make it work in tmux, add this into .tmux.conf.

set -g allow-passthrough on

And try the code below:

echo -e "\\033Ptmux;\033\033]777;notify;Blink Shell;Hello from Blink Shell notification\a\033\\"

As you can see, tmux must pass an escape sequence with the tmux; prefix to make it work. Any \033 characters in the wrapped sequence must be doubled.

You can read more about it in the tmux FAQ.

Real-life example

Here you can see a real-life usage example. This script builds VIM from the source. Upon successful completion, it displays a notification that works in both SSH and tmux.

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/vim/vim.git "$HOME/vim"                                                   
cd "$HOME/vim" || return                                                                                         
./configure --with-features=huge                                                                                           
make                                                                                                             
sudo make install                                                                                                
cd && sudo rm -rfv "$HOME/vim"                                                                                                                                                                                                   
if [ "$TERM_PROGRAM" = "tmux" ]; then                                                                            
  echo -e "\\033Ptmux;\033\033]777;notify;VIM;Build from source completed\a\033\\"                               
else                                                                                                             
  echo -e "\033]777;notify;VIM;Build from source completed\a"                                                    
fi

More information

• ANSI Escape Sequences: https://gist.github.com/fnky/458719343aabd01cfb17a3a4f7296797
• Tmux escape sequence passthrough: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-passthrough-escape-sequence-and-how-do-i-use-it