Is there a visual bell in Linux that works in X?

Question

I know there is such a thing as a visual bell in Vim that makes the whole screen flash instead of beeping. Several terminal programs also have the same feature.

I'm looking for a similar type of visual bell that will flash all of my screens, on all of my virtual desktops, in X. I've only got headphones at work and my pc speaker is too quiet, so I need some other notification method that will definitely get my attention.

Does anyone know if it exists?

Answer 1

I don't of anything exactly like that, but you can use the command line tool notify-send to have pop-ups on the desktop. In Ubuntu the package is libnotify-bin. For example:

notify-send -u normal -t 10000 -i info 'hw' 'Hello world'

Answer 2

You didn't specify GNOME or KDE, but KDE 4.2 has built-in support for this. If you look under System Settings > Accessibility, you can turn on the visual bell there. KDE also lets you customize actions for various system notifications that go beyond sounds. For example, you can show a popup, run a command, mark a taskbar entry, etc. This is under System Settings > System Notifications.

Answer 3

You could use something like Zenity to show an alert dialog, or perhaps even a notification area item. You could also use dzen or xmsgd if you want something text-based. Note that none of these 'flash the screen' though.

Answer 4

Depending on the nature of the event and what desktop environment you are using, Specto might work for you.

Answer 5

Depending on what you need, there is also xmessage—it's old, it's ugly, but it's included with X. It doesn't flash the screen, but it will pop up a message, and you can specify what buttons are on it (which one you press is returned in the exit status) if that's important.