Send Desktop Notification via VT Sequence (OSC777)

[skyline75489]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

On macOS there's terminal-notifier. On Linux there's notify-send. But on Windows I don't think there's a similar tool. Adding the support for desktop notification in WT would help scripts/TUI apps to send notification without too much hassle.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

The terminal-wg has not finalized a spec for this feature. The issue is here. The implementation is leaning towards using OSC 9/99/777.

[WSLUser]

But on Windows I don't think there's a similar tool

You have Win-Toast (this is what provides Desktop notifications in Win 10) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/shell/tiles-and-notifications/scheduled-toast

[WSLUser]

Also see microsoft/WSL#2466 (comment)

[DHowett]

I'd rather leave this as a gap to be filled by third parties than add support for notifications in Terminal. The world is awash with notifications -- websites ask, desktop apps have them, mobile apps spam you with ads even though they shouldn't -- and I don't want to contribute to that.

If a 3rd party wants to write a notifier, they're more than welcome to. 😄

[skyline75489]

Thansk @WSLUser for the very useful info. @DHowett That is actually a fair point. I'll close this. I think this thread is helpful for those who want the world to be even noisier (I'm not one of them. I'm just interested in those cool VT sequences 😄 )

[j4james]

Just to be clear, if someone came up with a PR adding support for something like OSC 777, would that be rejected? I'm not sure what is meant when you say a 3rd party is welcome to write a notifier. Does that mean it would have to be via a WT extension?

I understand some people may not like notifications, but since Windows lets you disable them on a per-app basis, that doesn't seem like it should be a big deal.

Not that I'm that desperate for this functionality, but I can see how it would be useful. I was about to suggest this as a possible solution for #7955, but that's clearly not an option if it's a definite "wont-fix".

[skyline75489]

I think what Dustin mean is a third party cli app that invokes the notification API of Windows, without the modification from the terminal side. 获取 Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>

[j4james]

How would that work over a remote connection though? The use case for this is when you've ssh'ed onto a remote machine that's executing a long running job, and you want to be notified when the job completes. It may not even be a Windows machine. You need an interoperable way for your job to let the local machine know that it's done.

Personally I can get by with just outputting a BEL, but I can see the appeal of having something more explicit that lets you know exactly what happened. There are any number of reasons you might hear a BEL, and you could also have multiple jobs that you're waiting on. Anyway, not essential for me. It just seemed weird to outright ban the feature.

[zadjii-msft]

How would that work over a remote connection though?

And that's all I needed to hear to justify this request IMO. I wouldn't reject a PR that implements that. It looks like there hasn't been a lot of progress in terminal-wg#13 unfortunately, and with Egmont out of the terminal game I doubt there will be any. Looks like kitty implemented OSC 9 and the in-progress OSC 99 (see kovidgoyal/kitty#1474 (comment)), though, since 99 was a spec in progress, I'd rather stick with the OSC777 / OSC9 implementations, to keep it simple.

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aside: The Windows 10 notification system is fairly elaborate, and it allows apps to put fairly rich content into the notification. Maybe at some point in the future, we might want to design a sequence for something like letting a user encode an adaptive card in a notification. Adaptive Cards might be a good solution there for x-plat rendering of the notification. That's more of a 2025 dream though - let's focus on the basics for now.

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This doc was also intriguing, had a good list of OSCs supported by hterm