Printing an ASCII spinning “cursor” in the console

Question

I have a Ruby script that does some long taking jobs. It is command-line only and I would like to show that the script is still running and not halted. I used to like the so

Answer 1

I wrote a gem spin_to_win that displays a spinner while yielding a block. For example:

SpinToWin.with_spinner('Zzzz') do |spinner| 
  spinner.banner('sleepy')
  sleep 1 
end

Zzzz \ [sleepy]

It can also track work pending vs. work completed:

SpinToWin.with_spinner('Zzzz') do |spinner|
    spinner.increment_todo!(3)

    spinner.banner('snore')
    sleep 1
    spinner.increment_done!

    spinner.banner('dream')
    sleep 1
    spinner.increment_done!

    spinner.banner('wake up!')
    sleep 1
    spinner.increment_done!
end

Zzzz \ 3 of 3 [wake up!]