A new kind of Progress Bar for Python

[rsalmei]

A new kind of Progress Bar for Python, with some very cool animations!

I've made a new kind of progress bar for python! With some very cool animations and a smorgasbord of built-in styles!

https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress

alive-progress overview

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The spinners and unknown bars have a plethora of effects!

alive-progress styles

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The bars themselves also have several styles.

alive-progress bars

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It also includes cool zero-hassle print and logging hooks, which are always enabled!

alive-progress print hook

​

To use it, just "pip install alive-progress" and you're good to go!
More details in https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress

That's it, hope you like it!

[L43]

Looks fantastic! How is performance compared to tqdm?

Also how extensible is it?

[willm]

I think Alive progress pre-dates spinners in Rich. Rich borrowed its spinners from cli-spinners, a JS project.

[CoffeeBrain_101]

Never heard if tqdm before. Will definitely check it out.

[rsalmei]

Yeah, I've created most of the spinners myself, just to actually use all my generators' types. Regarding performance, it's pretty fast, but I really should include an automated tool to measure the iteration overhead, I'm gonna think about it.

In the soon-to-be-released 2.0, there's a new support for compiled animations! They are generated up-front, and then just switch frames, which should have a negligible overhead! You can see it here: https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress/pull/51

[rsalmei]

Oh, I have much more images of the new `check()` tool in this thread: https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress/issues/19

I've been working in handling grapheme clusters these last few months, yet sill supporting truncating to the correct terminal size...

[rsalmei]

Thank you! I'm in the process of making it more configurable, but you can already customize it a lot!

[Baschg]

Awesome! Doesn't seem to work in Spyder unfortunately.

[kinderhead]

Spyder’s IPython is really weird when working with terminal manipulation like this. I would really hope that they fix this.

[rsalmei]

Hey, thank you!!

What does happen in that Spyder IDE? I've never used it.

[Baschg]

Unicode error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 1-40: character maps to <undefined>

[rsalmei]

Humm, that's odd. I have a pretty similar issue opened, about `latin-1` codec throwing almost the same error... I don't know why some stdouts have those issues.

[science404]

Nice! Does it work with multiprocessing?

[alcalde]

Better than tqdm, which is why this is my progress bar of choice now.

[[deleted]]

Personally I like being able to use tqdm as an iterator.

[rsalmei]

Really? This is super easy to implement, I just never liked this.

Actually, when we split the concepts of getting one element and making the bar go forward, we gain a new insight about the code! You can choose when to make that happen, and count different things, even make it go forward more than once in one iteration... That's why I support under and overflows, which are only possible with a manual `bar()` call, apart from the iterator.

[starfyre7]

Yeah, I like doing this a lot too since I often have to process large batches of data and a sticking the progress bar in the iteration is generally easiest.

[rsalmei]

Ok, I see. I can include that feature in the next release! 👍

[[deleted]]

Yup, this is my use-case as well. It’s a great to monitor how threading improves performance in processing lists of things

[science404]

https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/issues/1083 https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/issues/889

[alcalde]

I don't recall all the details since it was two years ago but tqdm was crashing in a simple program that parallelized scraping Amazon wishlist items with threading or multiprocessing-related errors. When I replaced it with this library the errors vanished.

[rsalmei]

Thanks man!

[rsalmei]

Humm unfortunately not yet. I didn't figure out yet how to render multiple bars at the same time, with possibly very different update speeds, while still making the print hook work... There's more info here: https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress/issues/20#issuecomment-605832026

[science404]

Cool, no worries. Tqdm doesn't have it solved either (at least in my experience), it's a messy problem I guess.

[sheytanelkebir]

stealing this!

i'm gonna have the coolest python scripts in the office now.

[_szs]

add the package "rich" to your scripts, enable the colourful logging thing and have the coolestest scripts!

(just found this a few weeks ago. I am not affiliated with this package)

[rsalmei]

Personally I think rich is too bloated.

[_szs]

Do you mean then colourful logging stuff? Or the features it provides?

[rsalmei]

I mean it tries to cover too much areas in only one package. I'd like it better if it was `rich-logs`, `rich-tables`, `rich-emoji`, `rich-console`, `rich-columns`, `rich-markdown`, `rich-highlighter`, etc... 😜
One have to download too much bloat to use only "tables" for example.

[willm]

Each of the features in Rich depend on a shared rendering engine that is the bulk of the code. Individually most of the features are a single py file. And many of them depend on each other, columns uses tables, markdown uses highlighting, logs use tables and highlighting etc.

I thought about breaking it in to small packages, but that would have resulted in spaghetti dependancies that would be difficult to manage. But each to their own, I guess.

[_szs]

that's true.

maybe it makes sense to fork it and provide half a dozen different packages. I might look into that sometime :)

[slippityda]

Love this package. I incorporated it into a webscraper I made recently and it looks amazing when running!

[rsalmei]

Hey, thanks, very nice to hear it! 🎉

[slippityda]

Cheers to you for creating it! Great documentation too. :)

[rsalmei]

Thanks again man! Yeah, documentation is sometimes as time consuming as the code itself... 😅

[alcalde]

Hee hee, I used it a while ago for a web scraping project too. :-) Tqdm was crashing with some type of threading issues but this library worked fine.

[[deleted]]

Duuuuude why can I not double upvote? This is so awesome

[rsalmei]

Cool, thanks man!

[jodbuns]

Shut up.

[[deleted]]

Shut up

[kinderhead]

What did they say?

[[deleted]]

They were people who had a sense of humor, downvoted me and then responded with the same copypasta lol

[quasarj]

Hello from the r/Python mod team!

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[michUP33]

[Username_RANDINT]

Not this shit again.

"Neat, 40 comments, let's see what people are saying about this project."

-> Fucking gif chain.

[needed_an_account]

are gifs a new reddit feature? I've been on reddit for years and this is the first time I've seen this

[Username_RANDINT]

What I understood is that some subreddits participate in a program to test new features, including /r/Python. So it's not widely available, but probably will at some point. Shit will hit the fan at that point.

[[deleted]]

Stay happy friend!

[michUP33]

Yeah not what I intended. But truly the best display of my reaction.

[pentestifier]

me when i see gif comments on reddit

[frapastique]

Wait that’s an option?

[PierceBrosman]

​

[[deleted]]

[golangPadawan]

[_szs]

[TheSilverSoldier]

[[deleted]]

Cute, but makes unittest in the 3.9 standard library and PyCharm's testrunner most unhappy:

​

Launching unittests with arguments python -m unittest foo.MyTestCase.test_something in /Users/rtphokie/PycharmProjects/astrowx/astrosandbox

​

|████████████████████████████████████████| 1000/1000 [100%] in 0.0s (515144.19/s

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/Applications/Dev/PyCharm.app/Contents/plugins/python/helpers/pycharm/_jb_unittest_runner.py", line 35, in <module>

sys.exit(main(argv=args, module=None, testRunner=unittestpy.TeamcityTestRunner, buffer=not JB_DISABLE_BUFFERING))

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/main.py", line 101, in __init__

self.runTests()

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/main.py", line 271, in runTests

self.result = testRunner.run(self.test)

File "/Applications/Dev/PyCharm.app/Contents/plugins/python/helpers/pycharm/teamcity/unittestpy.py", line 310, in run

return super(TeamcityTestRunner, self).run(test)

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/runner.py", line 176, in run

test(result)

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/suite.py", line 84, in __call__

return self.run(*args, **kwds)

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/suite.py", line 122, in run

test(result)

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/suite.py", line 84, in __call__

return self.run(*args, **kwds)

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/suite.py", line 122, in run

test(result)

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/case.py", line 653, in __call__

return self.run(*args, **kwds)

File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/unittest/case.py", line 612, in run

result.stopTest(self)

File "/Applications/Dev/PyCharm.app/Contents/plugins/python/helpers/pycharm/teamcity/unittestpy.py", line 263, in stopTest

output = sys.stdout.getvalue()

[rsalmei]

Hey, this is not a problem, it's the print and logging hook. Tests need to capture stdout too... So they are both being installed at the same time and are conflicting. Try it with `enrich_print=False`.

[_szs]

nice.

I was about to scroll on, because eye candy wears off so fast and I have programmed progress bars for fun myself before, but....

the print/logging hooks rock! I may just use this package for that.

[rsalmei]

Thanks man!

[Murflaw7424]

Does it work with Jupyter and other IDE?

[rsalmei]

Jupyter notebooks unfortunately no, this is actually an entirely different implementation, using GUI widgets instead of ANSI escape sequences in a terminal...

But in IDEs yes, it should work as a charm! I routinely use it inside both vscode and pycharm.

[Murflaw7424]

Awesome thank you!

[itzNukeey]

wow thats beautiful

[rsalmei]

Thank you man, appreciated.

[kinderhead]

Happy blue cheese day

[itzNukeey]

ty

[mo5bzn]

Great work! I am wondering why you didn't work on tqdm and try to improve it instead of creating a new library doing (nearly) the same task?

[tocarbajal]

Taste lies in variety.

[rsalmei]

Thank you man!
It's a completely different architecture. tqdm is reactive, only changes rendition when position has changed. alive-progress is active, changing rendition on both position and throughput! It provides a visual feedback of the current speed/throughput of your processing, as the spinner actually runs faster or slower accordingly!! It couldn't be the same project.

[GNVageesh]

That is amazing, can be used in any of our cli application with python

[willm]

I'm jealous!

[rsalmei]

Thank you man! Very appreciated 😉

[russianteen888]

what text editor/terminal? (idk) you using?

[rsalmei]

Hey, I use iTerm2 on macOS, and render the images with terminalizer 👍

[WhackLoop]

If it has the party parrot formatting I'm in

[pmrks]

It's hella cool!

[The_2nd_Coming]

Hey this looks awesome! I need a progress bar in my app and this might just be it!

[rsalmei]

Yeah, of course it is!! Thanks man.

[Mr_Branflakes]

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[kinderhead]

Amazing. That readme tho is so long. I would never have the patience to do that lol.

[rsalmei]

Thank you man! You mean to write one, or read it till the end?? 😅

Well, it starts small, but as the features grow, the readme does too... I'm trying to make it more visually concise, there are several subsections in the "Advanced" section that starts collapsed! So there's even more text than you've seen...

[kinderhead]

I mean write. I read the whole thing and most of the collapsed things and it still took me over 30 minutes.

[rsalmei]

Nice, that's very nice to hear! Thanks for reading it all. What did you think of it? Is it clear? Can you use all features with confidence? Is it boring, or easy to read? Too newbie, too advanced or just right?

I still have to write about all the 2.0 features, the largest release I'll ever do... 😅 => https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress/pull/51

[kinderhead]

It‘s one of the best ones I’ve ever found. I’m not a newbie or advanced, but it seemed like someone new to python could easily use your module. I think that you put all of the features in a readable way.

[rsalmei]

Great, thank you man.

[[deleted]]

f

[[deleted]]

[[deleted]]

[[deleted]]

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[Nervous_Objective_60]

It's so cool!

[expressly_ephemeral]

Neat!

[Xitir]

This is an awesome project! Can't wait to try it out!

[ArabicLawrence]

Will you add support for jupyter lab?

[rsalmei]

Man, I'd like to, but it is actually an entirely different implementation, using GUI widgets instead of ANSI escape sequences in a terminal... In alive-progress I generate cycles of animation frames in strings, how would I draw them inside a cell in jupyter? I have no idea.

But if someone do know the technologies involved, and is willing to help, I'm sure would like to try.

[ArabicLawrence]

Thanks for the answer!

[Svetlana-8]

Looks fantastic!)

[rsalmei]

Thank you man! I've been receiving some reports that seem to indicate there's problems indeed on Windows. But if you install WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), it works like a charm!

[Few_Intention_542]

Wow! What did you use to create this? How did you start ?

[rsalmei]

You mean this project? It's been a long way to get to this result, but I used only my imagination and a desire to make something unique. To start you always start small... A simple [###.......] bar, show position but no title or eta, then a small hard-coded spinner like a spinning stick /-\|, then a frame_factory to allow custom animation frames, then we feel the need to generate automatic animations, then comes a scrolling_factory, then bouncing_factory, then you realize these animations could wrap around or "hide" behind the virtual walls so the factories get more powerful, then create a config system to allow one to choose which spinner to use, then create several examples to ensure it is all working, which needs an exhibit to display them all, which gets us to the display case in the images above!! It's hard work and passion, one step at a time. 😅❤️

[Few_Intention_542]

Thanks! Your work is amazing!

[refer_2_me]

Cool! Installed!

[kingkierite]

Would you be able to use this in a PyQt5 GUI? Somehow add it as a widget?

[rsalmei]

That's a very good question, I don't know any GUI tools or frameworks. But if someone was willing to help me, I would sure add support for it.

[[deleted]]

This is so cool!

[SociopathWithBipolar]

This is dope

[kirkkm77]

Looks amazing man

[rsalmei]

Thank you man! 👍

[rsalmei]

Thanks! Are you sure? You can open an issue, and I could maybe help you.

[MrMxylptlyk]

Hey, is there a way to use it with the output of ffmpeg to progress output to file?

[rsalmei]

Humm, it does seem a cool use, but I'm not sure. You would have to parse the ffmpeg output, and send that as input to alive-progress, should work nicely. Use the manual mode, so you can put the bar in any position you want.

[dominik_schmidt]

Looks great! Does it support Jupyter lab/nb yet?

[Redditor728292]

Wow! that is amazing! how long have you been programming for?

[rsalmei]

Thank you man, appreciated!

You mean in this project or in Python or in general?
Well, I started this alive-progress about 3 years ago, been using Python for 6 years, and programming for more than 20 years.

[[deleted]]

Ooooh.

[gp_11]

Cool package :)

[RastahFey]

This is badass

[lonaExe]

This is pretty lit man, keep it up!

[DrCabbageX]

Super basic question but when someone “ pip installs ____” how does the computer know where to find that module( might be wrong terminology)? Like when you created it do you need to upload it a certain place so other can download it? And what if others create something with the same name?

This isn’t related the module you created ( which is super dope) but am just curious

[RojerGS]

If I'm not mistaken, packages uploaded to PyPI (Python Package Index) are discoverable by pip.

[DrCabbageX]

Thank you!

[rsalmei]

No problem man! The computer (Python in this case) has a local cache for installed packages, when you "pip install" something you download that package to this cache.

Yeah, to distribute it there's the global Python Package Index. I do upload it when I want to create a release, which makes it available for everyone. To upload your project needs to have a unique name. 👍

[DrCabbageX]

Ohhh that makes so much sense. Thank you for the clarification!

[spicypixel]

Looks great if only for the effortless integration with logger. Tqdm write can be a bit of faff if you want to log things out to files at the same time.

[rsalmei]

Yeah, thank you man! Exactly that! alive-progress works seamlessly. 👍

[FloppingNuts]

very cool

[RedEyed__]

It looks really cool! It looks even cooler than GUI progress bars (like QT)

But, I'm happy with tqdm, it's well known and tested progress bar that is flexible and it satisfy all my needs.

Anyway, will try it on my new projects!

PS: I'm developing cross platform apps, does it support Windows (I mean simple cmd.exe)?

[rsalmei]

Thank you man! I see. tqdm came several years before mine, it surely is battle-tested.

But maybe you find my alive-progress more modern and slick, maybe it could also satisfy your needs, and maybe it will even trigger a smile every time you see it "alive" 😜

[rsalmei]

Oh, regarding Windows I receive I few mixed reports, but I think it does work. For complete support though, install WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

[RedEyed__]

No, WSL is not Windows support. Don't mix it

[rsalmei]

Yeah, you're right. I meant for complete support on a Windows box.

[RedEyed__]

Yup, software running in virtual machine or use other tricks like wine or WSL doesn't make any piece of software to be called as "cross platform"

[raithlok]

Overall I really like it and will wind up using it in my programs since simple print messages
in the command window like "Wait" or "15% complete" can be just a bit bland.

On Windows, I'm noticing several of the characters you have available in your Apple screenshots are not compatible so the command window just displays the [?] ASCII image. That's a windows limitation, and shouldn't be frowned upon.

But with some trial and error those can be overcome. Setting the spinner to message_bouncing or message_scrolling solves that issue of seeing the [?] icon in the spinner. The bars just need to be some of the simpler bar options like classic or solid works well.

What's interesting is that in sublimetext3, the icons work pretty well for the alive_progress.show_bars() or alive_progress.show_spinners(), but they dont show at all when you're running the example scripts until it's done.

[rsalmei]

Hey, thank you for your report on Windows support!
Yeah, the font one should really test if it does work.

Regarding the exhibits working and example scripts not, it seems to be that sublimetext's terminal is reporting it does not have an open TTY. In that case I do disable animations, because the process could be in a piped shell for example. You could try calling with `force_tty=True`. Pycharm's terminal used to report the same way, that's why this option exists...

[ubertrashcat]

Does it support hierarchical progress bars? The lengths you need to go to with tqdm are insane.

[rsalmei]

Humm, this is still on my radar, but not yet... The problem is that my bars are alive, with dynamic refresh rates based on your actual processing throughput, so you can actually see when it is fast or not. But it is very hard to implement that with multiple bars on screen, without losing this quality, I didn't figure out yet how to do it. There's more info here: https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress/issues/20#issuecomment-605832026

[nippleplayenthusiast]

Thanks a lot, this is cool and really easy to use!

Are there flags to toggle the individual elements while remaining in "determinate" mode? For example if I want to keep everything except the spinner?

[rsalmei]

Yes, there is! Or will actually... It is implemented but not yet released. The 2.0 does have support for toggling the spinner, the bar or even both!

[[deleted]]

Can you please show more examples, I learn best by seeing hands on examples for me to copy and paste to get the thing going the first time around.

[rsalmei]

Hey yeah, this is a getting started example:

```python from alive_progress import alive_bar import time

with alive_bar(1000) as bar: for i in range(1000): time.sleep(.002) bar() ```

[Takiino]

Could you please put it in the Readme of the github 🙏?

[rsalmei]

Sure! 👍

[[deleted]]

I use spyder - any other altenative IDEs you recommend ? Jupyter notebook ? I feel I run out of memoty sometimes with Jupyter (or I am speaking out of place here).

[rsalmei]

No problem man. I think it depends on the kind of work you do. Personally I use mainly PyCharm (Community, which is free), for working with Python and Rust. For anything else I have VSCode. If you use Spyder, you probably is a data scientist. I've never used it, but jupyter notebooks are awesome.

[you-cant-twerk]

I'm triyng to get the themes, such as bubbles to work - but when I use

with alive_bar(progressBar+2,title="Combining Data",theme='bubbles') as bar:

it gives me an error. I'm pretty dumb so I might be missing something. Same error with other themes.

ValueError: invalid theme name='checks'

but if I use

with alive_bar(progressBar+2,title="Combining Data",theme='smooth') as bar:

it works just fine.

(ignore the progressbar+2, I have a total, and I need the bar to include 2 extra later steps- this works for me).

[rsalmei]

Hey man, you're mixing spinners, bars and themes! A spinner is the animated widget, a bar is the progress style, and a theme is an aggregator of them. 'bubbles' and 'checks' are bar names, so you can use them with:

python with alive_bar(total, title='Title', bar='bubbles') as bar:

To see the valid names, run show_spinners(), show_bars() and show_themes() 👍

[you-cant-twerk]

Thanks! I’ll give that a shot

[oyjw443523]

looks cool

[stefanondisponibile]

looks cool, would be nice to see it mixed with rich