[FR] Add option to sound a bell when evaluation takes longer than 10 seconds

[NightMachinery]

Since Julia is used for a lot of exploratory data science stuff that take (often unpredictable) time to complete, this feature can help the user multitask better.
I think a continuous alarm bell would also be nice (so two modes: a traditional one-off bell and one that needs active acknowledgment to be turned off).

[NightMachinery]

@davidanthoff I have been thinking about this; Would it be possible to have pre and post execution hooks as part of the API this extension exports? That would allow people to add things like this (and probably a thousand other things) easily.

[davidanthoff]

Maybe? What would such a pre and post hook be, though? A shell command?

[pfitzseb]

Easiest would be to allow arbitrary Julia code to be run in the hook. I'm not a big fan of something so general though.

[davidanthoff]

Yeah, agreed.

[NightMachinery]

@pfitzseb commented on Aug 10, 2020, 8:58 PM GMT+4:30:

Easiest would be to allow arbitrary Julia code to be run in the hook. I'm not a big fan of something so general though.

Why not? I love generality, so I'm curious what the failure modes are.

[NightMachinery]

@David Anthoff commented on Aug 10, 2020, 8:40 PM GMT+4:30:

Maybe? What would such a pre and post hook be, though? A shell command?

Well, I have written a shell loop that terminates when it receives a signal from a unix socket, and some wrappers around it for fast usage by Julia. Then I call those wrappers in Julia. This doesn't block the Julia process, and the loop is terminateable from outside Julia, too. The end UI is as simple as calling bellj() to initiate a background continuous alarm, and an okj() to terminate any such alarms started by whatever process.

But I imagine a simple blocking shell call to loop an audio file would also capture 90% of the value here.

PS: The pre-hook would record the current time, and the post-hook would check the time the execution took. If it took more than a specified duration, it'd call the alarm function.

[NightMachinery]

Opening an issue on Julia's discourse, as this hook functionality is their jurisdiction, and not particularly related to this extension.

[NightMachinery]

Following JuliaLang/julia#37047, I have successfully integrated an automatic bell for the normal REPL. However, the hooks introduced there do not work with this extension's background execution commands (basically all the commands except the one that copy-pastes to the REPL). Considering that IJulia is going to support the hooks as well, supporting them here seems appropriate.

[davidanthoff]

Hm, that is an interesting question...

I think we for example don't want to use the transforms that Revise.jl registers via that hook, and we probably should use the hook ourself for some of the things we do instead of our home-grown solution. But really quite unclear to me whether it is a good idea to apply these transforms to code that is executed via Alt+Enter...

[stevengj]

I think we for example don't want to use the transforms that Revise.jl registers via that hook

Why not?

[davidanthoff]

We're already calling revise at the right moment in our own code execution logic, i.e. we already have Revise.jl integration that we provide.