20

With the new state saving features (which I want to keep), the dock notifications are more aggrivating to me in Lion. Can I suppress the bounce and/or the notification badge functions?

While I like the new restore feature in Terminal.app that re-opens the tabs and shows the last 500 or so lines in the history, I absolutely hate that the Terminal.app now is so much more communicative and intrusive as before.

If I have a command like tailing a log file in the terminal, it constantly keeps telling me when there are new entries, which turns out to be pretty annoying.

Not only does the Terminal.app's icon jump in the Dock, it also has this nice little red badge telling me how many tabs have updates for me. Fortunately this only happens when the Terminal.app's window is hidden behind others, but nevertheless it's pretty annoying.

Terminal notifications

I looked through the Settings and can't find an option to disable this. Are there any hidden settings I could switch on/off there?

Improve this question
7
  • 1
    As much as I love the resume feature in Terminal.app, I just couldn't stand all the visual spam it was producing. I ended up switching to iTerm2 for now. Works flawlessly in Lion - the last update even brings Fullscreen functionality - and it is very customizable.
    – mwidmann
    Jul 28, 2011 at 8:30
  • 3
    It seems most of the people answering/commenting here are unaware of what the badge is for. To clarify: the Dock icon badge indicates the number of beeps caused by BEL (Control-G) characters being written to terminals in the background. If you show the tab bar, you'll see a corresponding "bell" icon in each terminal that has an "unread" bell. The bell indicator will clear and the bell count in the badge will be decreased if you activate that window/tab to view it. Viewing them all removes the badge.
    – Chris Page
    Aug 28, 2011 at 2:50
  • 2
    To see the behavior in action, run sleep 3; printf '\a' in a terminal shell and then switch to another tab, terminal window or application.
    – Chris Page
    Aug 28, 2011 at 2:58
  • "If I have a command like tailing a log file in the terminal, it constantly keeps telling me when there are new entries …" Does the log file contain BEL (Control-G)? That's the only reason it would behave that way. There's also a more passive "unread text" indicator that appears in the tab as ellipsis ("…") if there's any output at all in background tabs, but I assume that's not what you're complaining about.
    – Chris Page
    Aug 28, 2011 at 3:01
  • "As much as I love the resume feature in Terminal.app, I just couldn't stand all the visual spam it was producing." Can you elaborate? Do you just mean the restored terminal text?
    – Chris Page
    Aug 28, 2011 at 3:03

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
3

Google finds an example of what is, I think, disabling bounces for all Dock icons (not Terminal alone):

However, that may be not the solution in this case. Puzzling me: 

[macbookpro08:~] gjp22% date
Tue  2 Aug 2011 13:40:41 BST
[macbookpro08:~] gjp22% uname -a
Darwin macbookpro08.centrim.freeman-centre.ac.uk 11.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.0.0: Sat Jun 18 12:56:35 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1699.22.73~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
[macbookpro08:~] gjp22% defaults read com.apple.dock no-bouncing
2011-08-02 13:40:57.029 defaults[2501:303] 
The domain/default pair of (/Users/gjp22/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, no-bouncing) does not exist

— nothing relating to no-bouncing my preference file, and I can run for example

tail -f -n 50 /private/var/log/system.log

— then bring something other than Terminal to foreground, watch things added to the log and in my case:

  • lines added to the background window do not cause any bounce, do not cause any count to appear in the Dock icon.
Improve this answer
5
  • The Dock icon badge indicates the number of beeps caused by BEL (Control-G) characters being written to terminals in the background. Viewing those terminals will clear the count. Does your system.log contain any BEL characters?
    – Chris Page
    Aug 28, 2011 at 2:55
  • 1
    I've tried this with Terminal.app version 2.2.2 (303), and changing the value of no-bouncing seems to have no effect (it still bounces twice if it receives a bell while in the background).
    – David Wolever
    Jun 8, 2012 at 22:11
  • @DavidWolever It worked for me, at least when testing with sleep 3; printf '\a'. You have to quit and reopen Dock to apply the changes.
    – Lri
    Jun 9, 2012 at 2:47
  • Ah, I didn't re-launch Dock. That does seem to stop the bouncing!
    – David Wolever
    Jun 9, 2012 at 6:07
  • D'oh! Well, I'm an idiot. I didn't actually read the property that was being set. This turns off all Dock bouncing. Which… Isn't quite what I want.
    – David Wolever
    Jun 9, 2012 at 16:57
3 
defaults write com.apple.Terminal no-bouncing -bool TRUE

That way, it only applies to the Terminal. It didn't seem to work for me for the Dock anyway, so this is even better.

Improve this answer
0
-2

Cmd-K seems to clear the scroll back.

Improve this answer
2
  • Does that suppress the badge in the first place? I think the question is how do I keep this car on the road, not which tow truck gets me out of the ditch.
    – bmike ♦
    Aug 5, 2011 at 14:56
  • @bmike, no, clearing the scrollback does not affect the Dock icon badge.
    – Chris Page
    Aug 28, 2011 at 2:47
-4

Lion's window resume feature is set on an application by application basis. You can stop this in Terminal with the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Because you're editing the Terminal settings while having Terminal open, you'll need to close and restart Terminal twice before seeing the effect.

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    mwildmann said explicitely that he "likes the new restore feature" whereas that's the Terminal notifications that he wants to disable.
    – kraymer
    Jul 28, 2011 at 15:34
  • 1
    The dock icon badge is unrelated to Resume. Disabling Resume should not affect this (barring bugs).
    – Chris Page
    Aug 28, 2011 at 2:47

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .