Have Autotest speak to you

Update: the first .autotest I had in here was bogus, sorry about that. The .autotest file contents below work properly with Rspec tests at least.

I make extensive use of ZenTest's Autotest to constantly watch my test suite and ensure my app's tests are passing on my dev box/during development. Historically I've used Growl/growlnotify to get little popup notices indicating if my tests passed or failed. That's nice, and I've done the enhancements that add graphics and style it nicely, etc. But, in reality, I'm not always looking and sometimes don't see the messages. Plus, they can be somewhat distracting.

So, I've switched to using the handy say tool on the Mac (on Linux I think you could use "espeak", no clue on Windows, but then, uh, well, why are you doing dev work on Windows?! ;-)

The speaking is nice - I hear it, but don't get visually distracted. I use different voices for tests passed vs. failed too. This may not work great if you work in a cube farm, or even a cafe, but here at home, or in your own office, I think it's great. Here's my .autotest file as an example:

require 'autotest/redgreen'

module Autotest::Growl
  def self.growl(title, msg, img, pri=0, stick="")
    system "/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}" 
  end
  
  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    results = at.results.last

    unless results.nil?
      output = results[/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+pending)?/]
      if output
        failures = $~[2].to_i
        pending = $~[4].to_i
      end

      if failures > 0
        `/usr/bin/say -v Zarvox "you broke the code"`
      elsif pending > 0
        `/usr/bin/say -v Alex "Tests passed, with some pending"`
      else
        unless at.tainted
          `/usr/bin/say -v Victoria "all tests passed"`
        else
          `/usr/bin/say -v Victoria "tests passed"`
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

To see what voices your system has available, open the Speech system preference pane, pull down "System Voice" and select "Show More Voices" to see the full list.