Termistat

Termistat displays an ncurses-based status bar atop your STDOUT.

You have a long-running process that writes detailed log information to standard output. You would like to also be able to determine overall progress at a glance. You could scatter status lines among the log lines, but that's messy and can be hard to find. You could ditch the detail output and display status only, but then you lose the sense of what's going on at the detail level.

Termistat gives you the best of both worlds. You still have your detailed information, but you also have a status bar overlay with which you can display summary information.

Here's what termistat looks like in action:

gem install termistat

Include the module in your class, and you get a status_bar method.

class VerboseProcess
  include Termistat

  def perform
    1000.times do |index|
      status_bar progress(index / 1000.0)
      $stdout.puts "This is normal log entry number #{ index }"

      # do some hard work
      sleep(rand(10))
    end
  end

  def progress(pct)
    "status: %0.2f% complete" % (pct * 100)
  end
end

Don't want to or can't include? No problem, you can use the module method.

class VerboseProcess
  def perform
    1000.times do |index|
      Termistat.status_bar progress(index / 1000.0)
      $stdout.puts "This is normal log entry number #{ index }"

      # do some hard work
      sleep(rand(10))
    end
  end

  def progress(pct)
    "status: %0.2f complete" % pct
  end
end

Termistat provides a default configuration that will display your status bar in the top right corner of your terminal. Using the configuration DSL, you can customize the status bar to your liking.

Termistat.config do
  position   :top
  align      :center
  background :black
  foreground :magenta
end

• ffi-ncurses gem
• ncurses (tested with homebrew-installed ncurses)

The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2011 Solomon White

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.