What do the ActivityWatch and InactivityWatch plugins do?

Solution 1:

InactivityWatch

This new plugin was developed as described in this bug-report.

"Watch for silence" is useful in the following scenario: Suppose you have a long-running job that produces output while it is running, for example building some software. Then it would be cool to select the "Watch for silence" action. This would continuously monitor activity in the terminal, and when no output arrives for some configurable time, it would mark the window as urgent so that it flashes in the Gnome taskbar.

"Watch for activity" complements "watch for silence" and is useful for long-running jobs that seldom produce output, and you want to be alerted when output happens. Perhaps "tail -F /some/log/file | grep SomePattern" is a typical example.

Looking at the plugins source-code (/usr/share/terminator/terminatorlib/plugins/activitywatch.py), it is actually not configurable - it is hard-coded to display a notification 10 seconds after a file was last updated. Once this notification has been displayed, no further notifications are shown until the next file update.

ActivityWatch

When monitoring a log file, it is sometimes useful to be prompted when it has been updated.

A notification is sent whenever the file has been updated.

N.B. once a notification is displayed, another notification is not sent for another hard-coded 10 seconds, thus you dont have a continual stream of notifications being displayed for a continually updated file.

How to enable

Perhaps slightly confusing, the inactivitywatch and activitywatch plugins are displayed not by their plugin names.

Right-click a terminator pane - you can individually set to either watch for silence or watch for activity or both.

Solution 2:

I haven't seen the InactivityWatch plugin, but I can tell you what the ActivityWatch plugin does:

Right click a terminal window you're in and click "Watch for activity". Now, any time there is activity in that terminal, a notification through pynotify will be sent (which calls libnotify) and should show a notification on your desktop.

I am going to assume that the InactivityWatch plugin does the opposite of the ActivityWatch plugin and alerts you of a (long) inactivity in that terminal window.