The progress bar that doesn't convey any sense of progress (was Re: ...)

[Brian de Alwis]

On 1-Dec-2009, at 8:18 PM, Martin Pool wrote:
> I have one specific idea which I could do today, in between piloting:
> hide the progress bar and just show a spinner, plus the network
> indicators, plus the nerdy text.  The progress bar is not in practice
> a good indicator of overall progress until the code that feeds it is
> updated, so maybe it's better of hidden?  It sounds like people would
> generally prefer that.


cp(1) on MacOS X, and perhaps others, provides nerdy-ish text on ^T ('status character').  

   $ cp big-honking-file /dev/null
   [push ^T]
   load: 0.89  cmd: cp 54437 uninterruptible 0.00u 0.01s
   /Volumes/Data/Movies/The End of Silence (2005).m4v -> /dev/null   0%
   [push ^T]
   load: 0.89  cmd: cp 54437 uninterruptible 0.00u 0.05s
   /Volumes/Data/Movies/The End of Silence (2005).m4v -> /dev/null   1%

That, or something similar, might be handy.

Brian.

--
On bike helmets: "If you think your hair is more important than your brain, you're probably right."  (B. J. Wawrykow)