Annoying though it may be, you can run a program in the background that can write to your open terminal. Just in userspace you have; dmesg -w tail -f /

Annoying though it may be, you can run a program in the background that can write to your open terminal. Just in userspace you have; dmesg -w tail -f /var/log/messages There's also dbus to monitor on Linux systems and a lot of kernel hook tricks you can use to get a message pop up if an event happens. Because it gets annoying to have a process splurge notification stuff to a term you are working in, that's why you have info-bars which many terminal emulators support.