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I'm using the dynamic window manager of suckless (dwm). I noticed that firefox is able to send nice notifications when a download has finished. See the two figures

no notification

When I'm on a different tag, I get this kind of notification (inverted 1 tag) upon a finished download.

notification

I'd like to use this kind of notification for my other uxterms. E.g. in case a long job has finished it should light up like above. At best, this would also work inside the GNU screen sessions that I'm using.

I'm not sure if this is a Xorg or a dwm feature. Any ideas?

EDIT: The answer of @scai is very much to the point, but lacks the full compatibility with GNU screen. In case anybody can still improve this, it'd be very much appreciated.

Hauke Laging
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Sebastian
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1 Answers1

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This is probably the urgency hint which can be set on windows. This hint is recognized by most window managers.

Most terminals can be configured to set the urgency hint when receiving a bell. (u)xterm for example has the bellIsUrgent option and (u)rxvt has urgentOnBell.

To ring the bell in a terminal just run tput bel or echo "\a" (depending on the shell you might need to pass option -e to echo).

When using screen you have to turn off the visual bell and turn on the audible bell via vbell off in your screenrc or by pressing ctrl+a ctrl+g.

scai
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    yes sir! `tput bel` and `xterm*bellIsUrgent: true` is exactly what I was looking for. – Sebastian Nov 26 '12 at 10:02
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    it works almost perfectly, thanks! The audible bell in `screen`, however, works only if it is triggered from the visible screen-tab... – Sebastian Nov 26 '12 at 10:10
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    @Sebastian Ah that's true, I wonder whether this is a bug or if it can be turned off by some configuration option. – scai Nov 26 '12 at 10:12
  • this helped me a lot already though. I'll try to figure this out. Or maybe others have a clue? – Sebastian Nov 26 '12 at 10:16