I often launch a long running command (e.g. a build or firmware upgrade), then wander off to another virtual desktop to take care of a few small tasks while I'm waiting for the command to complete. Unfortunately those "little tasks" tend to suck me in and I forget that I was just filling in time while waiting for something.

Adding the function below to my zshrc makes it so that I can do things like lr make check and have a dialog pop up in my face when it's done -- even when I'm ssh'd to a VM or a remote machine. (Assuming I've used ssh -X remote.)

function lr()
{
    $*
    if [[ $? == 0 ]]
    then
      success=succeeded
    else
      success=failed
    fi
    zenity --info --text "command $success: $1"
}