Terminal Watch Notifier

Terminal Watch Notifier is the desktop notification companion to Terminal Watch. When Terminal Watch detects one of your regex triggers in a monitored terminal, it calls this extension, which raises a native OS notification on your local machine.

Created by Connor K.

🚀 Features

• 🔔 Native OS Desktop Notifications - Uses node-notifier to raise Windows, macOS, and Linux desktop notifications.
• 🖥️ UI-Host Extension - Runs on your local machine, so notifications appear on your desktop even when Terminal Watch itself runs inside a container, over SSH, or in WSL.
• 🤫 Hands-Free - No configuration, no commands to run, no UI to manage.
• 🤖 AI Agent Companion - Get a desktop ping when a CLI AI agent (Claude Code, Codex, Freebuff, and more) finishes its prompt in a watched terminal.

🛠️ How to Use

1. Install the Terminal Watch Pack (or Terminal Watch + this extension individually).
2. Use Terminal Watch as usual — this extension does the rest automatically.

When a trigger matches, Terminal Watch executes the terminal-watch-notifier.notify command that this extension registers, and a desktop notification appears.

📋 Requirements

• Requires VS Code version 1.125.0 or higher.
• Terminal Watch extension (installed automatically with this extension's pack, or on its own).

This extension declares "api": "none", which is what allows Terminal Watch to depend on it from inside a Dev Container or remote workspace while this extension keeps running on your local UI host.

🐳 Using a Dev Container? Terminal Watch is a workspace extension, so it must be installed inside the container — add BladeFin.terminal-watch to your devcontainer.json. This extension stays on your local machine automatically; you don't need to install it in the container.

⚙️ Extension Settings

None. This extension is fully automatic.

🔍 How It Works

• Terminal Watch (workspace extension) runs where your terminals run — inside a devcontainer, on a remote host, or locally — and detects regex matches in terminal output.
• Terminal Watch Notifier (UI extension) runs on your local machine's VS Code UI host. Terminal Watch invokes its terminal-watch-notifier.notify command across the extension boundary, and node-notifier raises the native notification.

This split guarantees desktop notifications are raised on the machine you are actually sitting at, even when the watched terminal lives in a container.

⚠️ Known Issues & Compatibility

• Desktop notifications depend on your OS's notification service being available and enabled.
• If node-notifier cannot be loaded in a given environment, this extension falls back to an in-editor VS Code notification.
• ⌨️ Triggers While You're Typing: This extension notifies whenever Terminal Watch matches a regex — and Terminal Watch matches against all terminal output, including the text echoed back while you type. So while you're actively interacting with a watched terminal, your input can fire a notification before your command actually finishes. Prefer trigger patterns that match finished output, or use Terminal Watch's notification cooldown to reduce noise.

📜 Release notes

See CHANGELOG.md in this repo.

📄 License

License: MIT