On using Zenity and Cron to remind me to go for lunch

Sometimes, I’ll get really caught up in a problem or meeting and find that actually, I was meant to go for lunch a little while ago.

Since lunchtime and a break from a problem is often the best debugger, I had a quick look into how to automate a reminder. While there are a million ways to remind yourself of upcoming meetings or tasks, I wanted something quite simple that I could dismiss easily and wasn’t tied to a work or personal calendar system.

What I ended up going with and have been using for a few months now is a quick solution that uses Cron and Zenity.

I simply

crontab -e

To open up my crontab and edit it.

Then put in the zenity command, which looks like this:

30 12 * * * zenity --info --text "<span foreground=\"white\" font=\"64\">Go and grab some 🍜</span>\n\n" --no-wrap --display=:0.0

And this pops up with a handy reminder each day.

This might be a bit hard to parse on first glance so let me break it down:

30 12 * * * is the cron task, saying, do this every day at 12:30.

zenity is the program that allows you to pop up a graphical window.

--info --text "<span foreground=\"white\" font=\"64\">Go and grab some 🍜</span>\n\n" is the contents of the message. Here we’re saying to use an info icon, as well as denoting the size and style of the text.

--no-wrap is just stylistic here, I found without it the alert was hard to read.

and --display=:0.0 is specifying what monitor to show the alert on.

And that’s it!