Comment by gwern

(An example of something which may already exist but I didn't see in my demo - more thoughtfulness on how to handle long-running tasks, and let us switch to something else, instead of us busy waiting on CC. For example, perhaps use of the system bell? That's usually set to flash or update the terminal title, and you can set your window manager to focus a window on the bell. I have my XMonad set to jump to a visible bell, which is great for invoking a possibly slow command: I can go away and focus completely on whatever else I am doing because I know I will be yanked to the backgrounded command the instant it finishes. I even set up a Bash shortcut, `alert () { echo -n -e '\a'; }`, so I simply run stuff like `foo ; alert` and go away.)