Be honest, how many times did you find yourself browsing the vastness of YouTube searching for cat video compilations, or checking out some random Facebook profile while waiting for a long-running Terminal command to complete?
If the answer is “countless times,” then know that you do not necessarily have a problem, after all, watching for minutes/hours on end for a command to finish is usually a very boring endeavor. The most frustrating thing is switching back to the Terminal not knowing exactly when the terminal command has finished, could be a few seconds, could be an hour, or even more.
Thankfully, there’s one little utility that can make your life a bit better and it goes by the very unassuming name of undistract-me. Mind you, it won’t make your life better as a whole, as that would be a lot to put on the shoulders of such a tiny app as undistract-me.
So, what exactly is undistract-me?
It’s a tiny, open-source app for Ubuntu (and other Debian-based Linux distributions) that notifies you when any long-running command finishes. If you’re already wondering, what qualifies as a long-running command, the answer is ten seconds.
This is by default, as undistract-me can also be configured. You can set the “LONG_RUNNING_COMMAND_TIMEOUT” to a different number of seconds and export it.
It’s also possible to disable notifications for various commands by simply adding them space-separated to the “LONG_RUNNING_IGNORE_LIST” variable.
undistract-me in its default state will only display a visual notification. However, you can make it so that it also plays an audible sound along with the notification in question. This is done by setting the variable UDM_PLAY_SOUND to a non-zero integer on the command line. Please note that this feature requires that pulseaudio-utils and sound-theme-freedesktop be installed on your system.
Verdict
undistract-me is a prime example of how a simple utility can make a world of difference. In this case, undistract-me is bound to make the lives of all Terminal addicts a bit better via its simple functionality that notifies them when a long-running command is complete.
