farski

There are many examples of terminal programs that do a good job displaying logs or activity while a process runs. Through deliberate use of things like color, spacing, clever ASCII characters for formatting, etc, when you see them they make you think something like, "ooh, that's pretty!"

I see them all the time, but it's always while I'm trying to get something done, so I never make note of noteworthy examples. Then, later, when I'm writing a script of my own I often feel like I'm reinventing wheels because I can't just go look at something that already does a good job. Or sometimes I do remember which program I thought looked nice, but I just don't need a new cloud database right now, so it's not very convenient to recreate the example to look at.

So I want to start collecting some good examples of terminal output. I think ergonomics for these sorts of things are very helpful, and usually not very hard/expensive to implement if you don't have to start from scratch. A resource with a handful of good examples would go a long way for me, and I imagine others as well.

Which programs log their activity in a way that you find particularly appealing or easy to work with?

(And just to clarify, this isn't great interfaces in terminals that I'm talking about (shell prompts, TUIs, etc), or even return values (like the output of a `dig` command). This is when you press Enter, and the program starts to spit out a bunch of text while it works, and that text looks very nice. Examples (not necessarily great examples) would be: running `update` in most package managers, a deployment process like Heroku or Terraform, or a build process like make.)