A terminal has no business interrupting you. Term asks for the notification permission for two things and passes along a third, and this page is the whole list — so you can decide once, knowing exactly what you are deciding about.
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One notification, carrying live progress, for a single upload or download of 200 MB or more. It exists because HarmonyOS suspends an app you have left: a transfer that size holds a data-transfer task so it keeps running while you are elsewhere, and the notification is the only surface that can still tell you how far along it is. It settles when the transfer ends and clears itself. Smaller transfers get nothing — on any ordinary link they finish before you could switch away.
One notification when we answer a ticket you filed, and a tap opens that thread. It needs you to be signed in, because a reply has to belong to an account to reach you on a device other than the one you wrote from.
If something you run on the far end emits one — the OSC 9 escape sequence, as in printf '\033]9;build finished\007' — Term hands it to the system. This is the one case where the words are not ours: a program you started asked for it and Term is the messenger. Nothing on a server can make Term notify you unless you ran it.
No marketing, no product announcements, no "you have not opened Term in a while", no daily summaries. One file in the app touches the notification API at all, and the three above are everything it sends.
Term never raises the system prompt out of the blue. Tapping Download does not produce a dialog. Instead a small banner appears — inside the Transfers sheet for a large transfer, above your ticket list for replies — saying what the permission is for, with Enable and a ✕. The system prompt appears only if you tap Enable.
Each banner appears at most once, ever. Dismiss it and it does not come back: no second attempt, no reminder later. The transfer runs either way — the notification is about being told, not about the work.
This is the part worth knowing before you choose. On HarmonyOS the notification dialog can be raised once per install. Once it has been refused, the call that raises it stops working — it returns an error and nothing appears on screen at all. That is documented platform behaviour that applies to every app on the device, not something Term can retry more politely.
So after a refusal, Enable does something different: it opens the system notification panel for Term, where you can switch notifications on by hand. Nothing is lost for good — but the one-tap route is gone, and what remains is a trip through Settings.
Which is the whole recommendation. If the banner appears and you can imagine ever wanting a 2 GB download to survive being backgrounded, allow it. It costs one tap, it is used for the three things above and nothing else, and it is far easier to turn off later than to turn back on.
Term has no notification switch of its own — the system panel is the only control. That is deliberate: an in-app toggle can disagree with the real permission, and then the app is telling you something the system does not agree with. Long-press the app icon, or go to Settings → Notifications → Term.
A refusal is remembered per install, not per session: closing Term, or updating it, does not give the dialog another chance. If notifications are off and you want them on, the panel above is the way in.