Carriage returns are good enough for progress bars, and seem to work fine in my emacs shell at least:

    % echo -n "loading..."; sleep 1; echo -en "\rABORT ABORT"; sleep 1; echo -e "\rTerminated"

works fine for me, and that's with TERM set to "dumb". (I'm actually not sure why it cleared the line automatically though. I'm used to doing "\rmessage " to clear out the previous line.)

Admittedly, that'll spew a bunch of stuff if you're sending it to a pager, so I guess that ought to be

    % if [ -t 1 ]; then echo -n "loading..."; sleep 1; echo -en "\rABORT ABORT"; sleep 1; echo -e "\rTerminated"; fi

but I still haven't made it to 15 dependencies or 200 lines of code! I don't get a full-screen progress bar out of it either, but that's where I agree with you. I don't want one.