undistract-me For Linux

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.

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.

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.