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Desktop notifications

During a recording session there are several situations where asciinema CLI needs to display a user notification. Typical scenarios include:

  • recording is suspended/resumed with ctrl+\ shortcut,
  • marker is added, with a user-defined shortcut,
  • file write error happens.

The notification must happen without printing anything to a terminal, therefore asciinema uses native desktop notifications for this, which don't interfere with the state of the terminal. This works out of the box on Linux (via notify-send) and macOS (osascript).

Note

Technically the recorder could show a notification inside a terminal by just printing a message but this can potentially mess up the output/expectations of a program currently running in the foreground, e.g. a shell, vim etc.

You can disable desktop notifications with the notifications.enabled option in the config file:

~/.config/asciinema/config
[notifications]
enabled = no

Custom notification command

A custom notification command can be configured with the notifications.command.

The command is executed with the following environment variables:

  • TEXT - set to the notification text,
  • ICON_PATH - set to the path of the asciinema logo icon.

Below is an example of tmux status bar integration:

~/.config/asciinema/config
[notifications]
command = tmux display-message "$TEXT"

The command is executed in a shell (/bin/sh), therefore it's possible to use shell constructs like pipes.