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This sounds like an idea borrowed from games or other media where doing certain actions results in an audible feedback. This is often done for the benefit of the audience, or to enhance the gaming experience, but I had an idea to implement this in my workspace to somehow influence my brain and make it more enticing to write code and somehow beat procrastination.

I wrote a Python daemon which on startup loads small .wav files into memory to make latency as small as possible, and listens for interrupts as well as reads from a fifo. Other programs can send commands to it to play certain chimes on demand. In ~/.vimrc I added autocommands on certain actions - buffer write, enter/exit Insert mode, enter/exit command line, text change, etc. to send commands to my daemon. Now, when I use vim, I get audible feedback of my actions during writing. Since this is all in a separate daemon done in an UNIXy way, adding support for this in other applications should be easy enough if I want to.

If there was interest, I think that I could clean up the project a little and publish it, including a set of free .wav chimes to use.




Related: Juice is the non-essential visual, audio and haptic effects that enhance the player's experience.

https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice


Recently I added sounds to a website that fall into this non-essential but experience enhancing (imo) category. I've had somewhat mixed response to this, from total annoyance to utter delight. I'm really not sure what the best approach is to take with sound on the web.

edit: Sounds are present when opening the console, or dragging a canvas around

https://stripe.dev/


Thank you for this fantastic link! Seriously. Bookmarked and planning to share. :)


The old SGI IRIX workstations had sound effects. (the OS is featured in the original Jurassic Park film with the very silly 3D file manager)

It was literally like the hacker movies and predated most of them. Keystrokes, button presses, everything made a little noise. My first boss talked about the horror of the university computer lab full of them before they turned all the sounds off (as well as the absurd cost of outfitting that lab).


With a daemon approach and clever integration within applications that handle missing fifo correctly, all you need to do to get rid of the sounds is just stop the service. And it's also configurable, so you can set what actions actually do produce sounds.


Sounds cool. I'm definitely interested.

Were you procrastinating when you wrote this?


The project is up on GitHub, here's Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41577391


Maybe. :-)


Yes I’m very interested. I had exactly the same idea, but solved it using the “say” command and a random grab from a set of strings.

I’m a Python dev and I’m happy to contribute to a project is you get it started.


I'll set it up on GitHub in 1-2 days and publish it on Hacker News.


Yes! Please do!


The project is up on GitHub, here's Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41577391


Thanks for following up, King!


I'd love to try this out, do you have a name for the project so I know how to search in a later date?


The project is up on GitHub, here's Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41577391


I think I could use a sound when I switch modes in Helix. Thank you for looking into this!


I am interested to give this a try if you share.


I’d love to get this for my own machines.


Count me in as interested!


Definitely interested


I would be very interested, potentially for future commercial purposes.




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