Command line spinners: the magic tale of modern typewriters and terminal movies

In the latest release of ABS, we introduced a package manager that fetches an archive from GitHub and installs it locally: like in many other command-line interfaces, we decided to add a “loader” to accompany the process, something that looks like this:

I want to take a moment to reflect on how we implemented the simple spinner you see in the video, a process that derives from typewriters and movies — let’s get to it!

My wife usually refers to movies as pictures, something that leaves me confused as I’m not familiar with the term. But when you think about it, we’re often dealing with the same term in the context of award winning movies — who won best picture at the last academy awards?

This happens because movies, in their essence, are simply a collection of pictures stitched together, put in motion to give us the illusion of something happening in front of our eyes while, in reality, it’s just a very quick passing of images, aided by sounds, that trick us into believing a story is unfolding in front of our eyes.

Now, we said we wanted to create a command-line spinner, and you can probably see where I’m going already: we can borrow the very same concept of motion picture and apply it to the command-line — have a few different characters (pictures) that are swapped very quickly to give us the illusion of an animation, kinda like this:

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