terminal-notifier for coding agents

terminal-notifier posts a native macOS banner from the command line. Install it, chain it onto a long command, walk away.

brew install terminal-notifier
claude -p "run the full test suite"; terminal-notifier -title "Claude" -message "done"

For a single run you're waiting on, that's the whole job, and nothing here is going to talk you out of it.

When the banner never appears

terminal-notifier ships as an application bundle rather than a plain binary, because macOS won't let a Foundation tool post a user notification. The practical consequence catches almost everyone: it gets its own row in System Settings, Notifications, separate from your terminal, and that row has to be allowed. Focus and Do Not Disturb suppress it too, without any error.

So when the command runs clean and nothing shows up, check those two before touching the script.

You can also borrow another app's identity, which makes clicking the banner useful:

terminal-notifier -title "Claude" -message "done" -sender com.apple.Terminal

Use the hook, not the exit code

Chaining on ; fires when the process exits. For an interactive session that's the wrong moment. Claude Code stops and waits for you a dozen times before it exits: permission prompts, questions, plan reviews. A Notification hook fires at each of those instead:

{
  "hooks": {
    "Notification": [
      {
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "terminal-notifier -title 'Claude Code' -message 'needs you'"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

That's a genuine improvement over the exit-code version and it's where most people's setup ends up.

The ceiling

It's the same ceiling every notification tool hits. A banner is an event, not a status.

Run four agents and the message above fires four times with identical text. Which project? Which branch? Which one is still waiting versus already answered? None of that is in the banner, and you can't put it there, because the hook doesn't know either. Miss one while you're heads-down and Notification Center hands you a row that says "needs you" with no way back to the session.

AgentNotch reads session state directly instead of reacting to an event, so a waiting session stays marked. Each row carries the project, the branch, the agent, and which app it's running in, and clicking one jumps to that terminal tab.

Different layers. Keep your banners for scripted one-shots. The live status is the part you can't script.