## Desktop notification when paru requires user interaction?

[LalithSecondary]

Hi 👋

I often run paru -Syu in another workspace and forget about it for a while.
When I come back, I sometimes find that the update stopped minutes ago because
paru was waiting for:

• sudo password input
• confirmation prompts
• AUR selection / diff review

From a UX perspective, it would be really useful to get a desktop
notification (via libnotify, for example) whenever paru reaches a state
where human interaction is required.

I know this can be achieved externally by wrapping paru and watching stdout,
but I wanted to ask:

• Is there any existing support or planned feature for this in paru itself?
• Would exposing a hook / flag / structured output for “waiting for input”
  be considered acceptable design-wise?
• Or is an external wrapper the officially recommended approach?

I’m not suggesting auto-accepting prompts or bypassing security — just a
notification to avoid unattended stalls during long updates.

Thanks for maintaining paru — it’s been rock solid for daily use.

[Lalith-47]

Short answer: paru itself does not currently provide desktop notifications, and
this is unlikely to be built-in.

Longer explanation:

paru intentionally behaves like a terminal-first tool and relies on standard
stdin/stdout interaction. It does not have a reliable, structured way to know
when user interaction is required, because prompts come from multiple layers:

• sudo (password prompt)
• pacman (confirmation / replace prompts)
• makepkg (PKGBUILD questions, diff, etc.)

From paru’s perspective, these are just streams of text, not explicit states.
Adding libnotify support would require:

• parsing and maintaining prompt patterns
• introducing desktop-specific dependencies
• making assumptions about the user’s environment (X11/Wayland, notification daemon)

That goes against paru’s design goals of being minimal, portable, and predictable.

The recommended and most flexible solution is exactly what you described:
an external wrapper that watches stdout/stderr and triggers notify-send
when known prompt patterns appear.

This keeps paru simple, avoids false assumptions, and lets users tailor the
behavior to their desktop environment and workflow.

So in short:

• Not supported natively
• Not planned (by design)
• External wrappers are the correct approach

Your wrapper idea is the “Unix way” and fits well with how paru is intended to be used.

[LalithSecondary]

got the answer