terminal activity indicator/alert when in background

[damnskippy]

Problem:
Often times there's a command invoked on the shell prompt that's long running and takes a while, and the user switches to a different window and puts the terminal window in the background while waiting for this command/job to complete. When the job completes, user is unaware this happened until the terminal window is switched back to (foreground) or user periodically peeks to see if the job has completed.

Suggestion:
If there can be some some sort of visual indicator or alert when there is terminal activity to suggest there is new output logged into the terminal, it would provide a cue to the user that the job may be complete. If the long running job happens to continually output to the terminal this wouldn't be as useful, but most times there's a job that runs for an unpredictable amount of time and then terminal returns to the prompt.

The indicator could be a temporary flashing of the window title in the task bar, and/or a change to a different shade/color until user has acknowledged the alert. Or may be display a badge on the title bar.

Alternatives considered that are not viable or great:

• use unix terminal bell (I couldn't get this to work reliably while ssh'ed into different servers), also this requires user have the sound/headphones on, and is a one time event that if the user can miss (when the bell is rung), or if there are multiple windows there is no indication as to which window/pane is the one beeping.
• use some type of window pop up (would require X or some such windowing to accomplish this, and not native to terminal).
• notification systems similar to growl/notifier/etc (in MacOS) or even the Windows notification are not accessible while ssh'ed into a remote server where such long running command is run.

Terminal output based activity detection and alert seems native and logical place to do this without relying on any other system features.

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maintainer edit: spec here

[damnskippy]

@j4james @zadjii-msft,
Here I suggested a terminal output/activity based alert mechanism. This detection will be so native to the terminal, the user doesn't have to explicitly say "notify me when done" or in cases when the user may not have had a chance to say "notify me" (user didn't anticipate/predict the command to take long to finish), and yet wants to see a notification.
Using terminal output activity as the trigger will mean it will work on both local and remote (ssh) sessions.
#7718 while similar seems to be a slightly different use case where the user explicitly has to request to be notified via the OSC. I think both use cases have their place. The output based notification falls flat when there the long running command is continually spewing output.
Thanks.

[damnskippy]

I don't use a mac, but it seems iterm has a feature like this based on this information in this post. I've seen it in one other terminal emulator as well (SecureCRT I think).

[zadjii-msft]

So, if this was to be implemented, and someone were to run something like a build that was displaying output constantly, wouldn't the indicator just be perpetually on? I don't really see the value in that, so there would have to be some sort of contextual way to enable/disable this.

Though I guess reading that post, the indeterminate progress wheel as the indicator kinda makes sense - then the wheel stopping spinning would be the indicator that the process stopped running. My only great disappointment is there's not a good way for the terminal to display that indicator in the taskbar icon. We could easily add the indicator to the tab itself, but that would only be visible if the window was visible. (see also #3991)

I personally think that this is better served by a combo of #3004 and having the client application emit the corresponding sequence.

Maybe we could combine the activity spinner with the indeterminate taskbar state. Add a setting to allow the user to show indeterminate state in the taskbar while the indicator is active. We'd probably want that to be overridden by whatever the client sets from the VT sequences as described in #3004, but that's not out of the realm of possibility. Obviously we'll want a setting both for enabling/disabling the indicator at all, and then a second one(?) for mirroring the indicator to the taskbar. That would only work if the "in progress" pane is the active pane, but that's good enough for most use cases I'd bet.

The longer I think about this, the more I've gone from "this seems ridiculous" to "we need to have this"

[damnskippy]

Impressive how you are able to keep these "related" issues in the head and can call out at will and tie them together :-)
It's a very useful feature IMHO (shamelessly plugging my request again).

In terms of usage, one could slice the end user requirement/experience in a couple of ways:

• a long running command that continually spews output (such as a build), versus, commands that run for a while without outputting anything but when they end, terminal returns to the prompt. And in both cases having the terminal activity indicated to the user in some form is useful depending on the use case, the latter being more useful scenario.
• user knows ahead of time and explicitly requests an alert, to be notified, at the end of the long running command, versus running a command that the user is oblivious to how long the command will take to complete, or didn't expect for it to take long when launching the command unsuspectingly but wants to be notified of the status in the background.

It seems the UI options you've suggested above covers both (or all 4) cases - please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks as always.