Comments on: Pimp Your XMonad #4: Urgency Hooks

By: jayjay

jayjay — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:26:44 +0000

this is my main loop. i get errors when i try to change it to a similar loop like the one in this article. I want to add the withUrgencyHook NoUrgencyHook into my loop. does anyone have any ideas?

main = xmonad=<< statusBar myBar myPP toggleStrutsKey myConfig
{
– removed stuff from here
}

By: ben

ben — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:09:10 +0000

Screenshot is 404′d.

By: scottkidder

scottkidder — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:16:45 +0000

I have an alias for the bell, bp=’echo -e “\a”‘
So I can run about anything, eg. pacman -Syu && bp and get notified when it’s done.

By: bradenshep

bradenshep — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:34:30 +0000

Creative, I may do that. I forget about offscreen commands all the time and end up thinking “What was I waiting for again?”

By: Devin Mullins

Devin Mullins — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:12:11 +0000

IIRC, XChat has an urgency option that’s pretty easy to find. (I think it says something about flashing the taskbar.) That option is actually what started my desire for urgency in xmonad.

Braden – at work, I take it further – I put \a in my $PS1. If *any* command finishes off-screen, I know about it. I also put “au * BufRead norm \” in my .vimrc so I can go elsewhere while waiting for vim to load a file from a slow NFS mount, or while waiting for our slow-ass VCS to pop up $EDITOR.

By: bradenshep

bradenshep — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:19:17 +0000

@Jon:

#xmonad can help you with dzen not working, if you’d prefer to go back to it.

As to which apps will set urgency, I don’t know of any off the top of my head. On some level any apps that might need to notify you should do it, but most don’t or don’t make the option easy to find. (Really, Pidgin’s isn’t easy to find, it’s just such a widely used app that it was easy to find on Google.) There may be extensions for Thunderbird that do that, I don’t know.

Console apps, though, are another story. Lots of them use the system bell as a notification by default or have obvious options to do so. Then you can simply set up your terminal as above. That allows pine, mutt, anything to trigger urgency.

When I’m running a long compile job or other process on some workspace, and don’t want to forget about it, I use
compile command; echo -e “\a”, which turns on escape character interpretation in echo, and echoes a bell character, triggering the urgency hints.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:43:54 +0000

Sorry for the late reply, it took me a while to get urgency hooks working (actually they wouldn’t work at all in dzen2, so I had to try xmobar instead).

Anyway, my question is what other apps will send urgency bells besides pidgin? Pine seems to do so, and will be replacing my thunderbird shortly. What else should I be using to take advantage of urgency hooks?

By: Improved Means For Achieving Deteriorated Ends / Endless Blather

Improved Means For Achieving Deteriorated Ends / Endless Blather — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:12:54 +0000

[...] is off the ground by then. Also, if you use Xmonad there’s a good guide to Urgency Hooks here. Open Source development is still being thoughtfully explored. See, The Free as in Beer Economy and [...]

By: frosch03

frosch03 — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:57:01 +0000

Thx :) That was missing in my xmonad.hs for a longe time :)

Btw, if you want your xterm to set the urgent-flag on a bell-event add the following to your .Xresources

XTerm*bellIsUrgent: true

And don’t forget `xrdb -merge .Xresources` to merge the changes :)

By: Devin Mullins

Devin Mullins — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:57:44 +0000

1. BTW, I don’t have a statusbar, so I go the uncommon route of popping up a temporary dzen. :)

2. focusUrgent doesn’t just go to the last urgent; it pops the stack (or dequeues the queue, I forget).

3. At work, I have taken use of this extension to an extreme level. My PS1 includes a bell, any time I have a bash script that calls `read`, I echo a bell, and my .vimrc includes “norm \” and “au WinEnter * norm \” which will echo a bell. Pretty much any time something is asking for input on another workspace, I get notified. (I’d love to do this at the pty level instead of app-specific hacks, but I don’t [yet] know enough about how/if that’s possible.)