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   Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Apr-2025 08:42:23 JST Chris Siebenmann

   Every command line tool that pretty-prints progress bars and live status reports and all that stuff as it goes along in ways that constantly print characters and require a cursor-addressable display (or ANSI code support or etc) should have a way of turning all that off and printing things a line at a time with no fancy progress bars.

   This rant is brought to you by dnf5, but it's not the only offender. At least 'apt' isn't the only way, you can use 'apt-get' and so on.

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 17-Apr-2025 08:48:37 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     @cks I guess checking $TERM (where "dumb" means no ANSI) and if stdout/stderr is a TTY should be enough?

     At least that way pipes/file-redirects doesn't puts a bunch of ANSI even when running in a terminal. And TERM=dumb allows very basic terminals (or even non-terminals) to still work.

   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 17-Apr-2025 09:05:55 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Tim Chase

     @gumnos @cks Yeah, NO_COLOR is a pretty cool thing.

     And while I can appreciate progress information (which spinners don't provide), I think it should typically be opt-in specially when it comes to terminal programs. One reason being to let long running programs in the background without them trashing what's running in the foreground.

   • Embed this notice
     Tim Chase (gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 17-Apr-2025 09:05:57 JST Tim Chase

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan

     I have indeed used

     $ miscreant.prog | cat

     or

     $ cat | miscreant.prog

     (or both) to lie to programs that behave poorly when isatty() returns true. I shouldn't have to, and the `TERM=dumb miscreant.prog` sometimes does the job.

     For just color aspects, some progs respect `$NO_COLOR` (https://no-color.org/) which might be enough.

     But yes, staaahp it with the unbidden progress-bars and twirlers and whatever.

     @cks

   • Embed this notice
     Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Apr-2025 11:23:30 JST Chris Siebenmann

     in reply to

     It's my further view (not expressed in my original toot) that it's not enough for command line tools to suppress their fancy output if they're not being run through a tty. I want to be able to run them from a regular shell session, in a pty, without the fancy output, for a variety of reasons.

     I may be running them under `script' to capture their output but still leave them interactive. I may be working over a slow or saturated network link and I don't want to get all that extra text. Etc.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 17-Apr-2025 11:36:08 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @cks Slow network link reminds me of how high-latency (A)DSL is due to modems, but also how high-latency computers on another continent can be and sadly for those it's purely the laws of physics.