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Programming language: Go
License: Apache License 2.0
Latest version: v0.8.0

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README

Yet Another CLi Spinner (for Go)

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Package yacspin provides yet another CLi spinner for Go, taking inspiration (and some utility code) from the https://github.com/briandowns/spinner project. Specifically yacspin borrows the default character sets, and color mappings to github.com/fatih/color colors, from that project.

License

Because this package adopts the spinner character sets from https://github.com/briandowns/spinner, this package is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

Yet Another CLi Spinner?

This project was created after it was realized that the most popular spinner library for Go had some limitations, that couldn't be fixed without a massive overhaul of the API.

The other spinner ties the ability to show updated messages to the spinner's animation, meaning you can't always show all the information you want to the end user without changing the animation speed. This means you need to trade off animation aesthetics to show "realtime" information. It was a goal to avoid this problem.

In addition, there were also some API design choices that have made it unsafe for concurrent use, which presents challenges when trying to update the text in the spinner while it's animating. This could result in undefined behavior due to data races.

There were also some variable-width spinners in that other project that did not render correctly. Because the width of the spinner animation would change, so would the position of the message on the screen. yacspin uses a dynamic width when animating, so your message should appear static relative to the animating spinner.

Finally, there was an interest in the spinner being able to represent a task, and to indicate whether it failed or was successful. This would have further compounded the API changes needed above to support in an intuitive way.

This project takes inspiration from that other project, and takes a new approach to address the challenges above.

Features

Provided Spinners

There are over 80 spinners available in the CharSets package variable. They were borrowed from github.com/briandowns/spinner. There is a table with most of the spinners at the bottom of this README.

Dynamic Width of Animation

Because of how some spinners are animated, they may have different widths are different times in the animation. yacspin calculates the maximum width, and pads the animation to ensure the text's position on the screen doesn't change. This results in a smoother looking animation.

yacspin

yacspin animation with dynamic width

other spinners

other spinners' animation with dynamic width

Success and Failure Results

The spinner has both a Stop() and StopFail() method, which allows the spinner to result in a success message or a failure message. The messages, colors, and even the character used to denote success or failure are customizable in either the initial config or via the spinner's methods.

By doing this you can use a single yacspin spinner to display the status of a list of tasks being executed serially.

Stop

Animation with Success

StopFail

Animation with Failure

Animation At End of Line

The SpinnerAtEnd field of the Config struct allows you to specify whether the spinner is rendered at the end of the line instead of the beginning. The default value (false) results in the spinner being rendered at the beginning of the line.

Concurrency

The spinner is safe for concurrent use, so you can update any of its settings via methods whether the spinner is stopped or is currently animating.

Live Updates

Most spinners tie the ability to show new messages with the animation of the spinner. So if the spinner animates every 200ms, you can only show updated information every 200ms. If you wanted more frequent updates, you'd need to tradeoff the asthetics of the animation to display more data.

This spinner updates the printed information of the spinner immediately on change, without the animation updating. This allows you to use an animation speed that looks astheticaly pleasing, while also knowing the data presented to the user will be updated live.

You can see this in action in the following gif, where the filenames being uploaded are rendered independent of the spinner being animated:

Animation with Success

Pausing for Updates

Sometimes you want to change a few settings, and don't want the spinner to render your partially applied configuration. If your spinner is running, and you want to change a few configuration items via method calls, you can Pause() the spinner first. After making the changes you can call Unpause(), and it will continue rendering like normal with the newly applied configuration.

Supporting non-TTY Output Targets

yacspin also has native support for non-TTY output targets. This is detected automatically within the constructor, or can be specified via the NotTTY Config struct field, and results in a different mode of operation.

Specifically, when this is detected the spinner no longer uses colors, disables the automatic spinner animation, and instead only animates the spinner when updating the message. In addition, each animation is rendered on a new line instead of overwriting the current line.

This should result in human-readable output without any changes needed by consumers, even when the system is writing to a non-TTY destination.

Usage

go get github.com/theckman/yacspin

Within the yacspin package there are some default spinners stored in the yacspin.CharSets variable, and you can also provide your own. There is also a list of known colors in the yacspin.ValidColors variable.

cfg := yacspin.Config{
    Frequency:       100 * time.Millisecond,
    CharSet:         yacspin.CharSets[59],
    Suffix:          " backing up database to S3",
    SuffixAutoColon: true,
    Message:         "exporting data",
    StopCharacter:   "✓",
    StopColors:      []string{"fgGreen"},
}

spinner, err := yacspin.New(cfg)
// handle the error

spinner.Start()

// doing some work
time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)

spinner.Message("uploading data")

// upload...
time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)

spinner.Stop()

Spinners

yacspin.CharSets index sample gif (Frequency: 200ms)
0 0 gif
1 1 gif
2 2 gif
3 3 gif
4 4 gif
5 5 gif
6 6 gif
7 7 gif
8 8 gif
9 9 gif
10 10 gif
11 11 gif
12 12 gif
13 13 gif
14 14 gif
15 15 gif
16 16 gif
17 17 gif
18 18 gif
19 19 gif
20 20 gif
21 21 gif
22 22 gif
23 23 gif
24 24 gif
25 25 gif
26 26 gif
27 27 gif
28 28 gif
29 29 gif
30 30 gif
31 31 gif
32 32 gif
33 33 gif
34 34 gif
35 35 gif
36 36 gif
37 37 gif
38 38 gif
39 39 gif
40 40 gif
41 41 gif
42 42 gif
43 43 gif
44 44 gif
45 45 gif
46 46 gif
47 47 gif
48 48 gif
49 49 gif
50 50 gif
51 51 gif
52 52 gif
53 53 gif
54 54 gif
55 55 gif
56 56 gif
57 57 gif
58 58 gif
59 59 gif
60 60 gif
61 61 gif
62 62 gif
63 63 gif
64 64 gif
65 65 gif
66 66 gif
67 67 gif
68 68 gif
69 69 gif
70 70 gif
71 71 gif
72 72 gif
73 73 gif
74 74 gif
75 75 gif
76 76 gif
77 77 gif


*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the yacspin README section above are relevant to that project's source code only.