Is there a smarter alternative to “watch make”?

Question

I ran into this useful tip that if you\'re working on files a lot and you want them to build automatically you run:

watch make

And it re-runs make every couple s

Answer 1

You could change your make file to output a growl (OS X) or notify-send (Linux) notification. For me in Ubuntu, that would show a notification bubble in the upper-right corner of my screen.

Then you'd only notice the build when it fails.

You'd probably want to set watch to only cycle as fast as those notifications can display (so they don't pile up).