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Desktop notifications

A program can say it has finished: OSC 9 or OSC 777 marks its tab with a dot and reaches the desktop, unless you are already looking at that pane.

• Both common forms. urxvt’s OSC 777;notify;title;body, which foot, kitty and WezTerm read too, and iTerm2’s OSC 9;message. ConEmu’s numbered OSC 9 subcommands, such as its progress bar, are not notifications and are not posted.
• The tab is marked with a magenta dot that outranks the bell’s, so a tab in the background says that something spoke.
• Only when you are not looking. It reaches the desktop unless that pane is the one you are typing in, in the window in front. A notification with no title is titled after its tab.
• Each platform’s own way: notify-send, or the session bus through gdbus, on Linux; osascript on macOS; a PowerShell toast on Windows.
• No floods. One per pane every two seconds reaches the desktop; the rest still mark the tab.
• The text is treated as hostile. Control characters are stripped, it is cut to a length a bubble can show, and it reaches each command as an argument or an environment variable, never inside a script.
• One switch. Settings → Terminal → Display → Desktop notifications turns the desktop half off; the tab is still marked.

See What programs can ask for.