> Honestly I believe that as developers we don't use audible feedback enough in our tooling.

Allow me to point out a very cool project I saw in the early 2000s, which unfortunately seems to have been abandoned and forgotten: http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html (Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring your network with sound).

Agreed. I usually laugh at TV shows and movies that use a bunch of beeps and boops in their computer scenes.[1]

But sometimes I actually want that! Like, if there was a switch I could flip to turn on audio cues every time a window's contents are updated, or new lines appear in a terminal window. And every window update would be tagged with a different sound for error, warning, info, success, etc.

I know you can configure your terminal to play a BEL sound, but I'm looking for something system-wide. I want it like the movies, so I can pay attention to something else and not have to check in on the progress of my compilation or transcoding or long download.

remember ping?

     -a      Audible.  Include a bell (ASCII 0x07) character in the output
             when any packet is received.  This option is ignored if other
             format options are present.

I've been feeling just the opposite - I've been using an IDE from the mid-2000s for a legacy project, and it's amazing how things have changed. The search function dings a bell if nothing is found, and it does it in real-time as you type... so it gets annoying really quick (no auto-complete, and not even ctrl-v to paste in to the search query)

i stick the OS's equivalent of `bell` at the end of long-running scripts :)

Also shell (edit: as noted elsewhere):

$ say "Your build is done."

command && say done