3️⃣ Here's the 3rd installment of posts highlighting key new features of the upcoming v257 release of systemd.
So after the relatively heavy fare of the 2nd episode, here's something to digest more easily.
Since a while systemd has been showing nice terminal progress bars when doing certain slow operations (for example, when systemd-repart initializes a disk). With v257 we go one step further with this. Whenever we show the progress bar we'll now also issue certain terminal ANSI sequences …
… that tell your terminal emulator that a slow operation is going on and what the progress currently is.
The ANSI sequences for this are commonly used on Windows, where the new Windows Terminal implements them and paints a pretty little spinner on your terminal tab when they are issued. On Linux terminals the sequence is so far mostly ignored, but maybe it's time that changes? I think it's a truly useful feature because it can communicate progress information about slow operations to the user…
@pid_eins It also means that since the terminal emulator knows the progress status of a long-running operation, terminals might be able to get a feature where, during one of these long-running operations, you can tell the terminal emulator to shut down the system (or run a command) when it is done.
I think this would be really neat, since sometimes I will start an operation, realize it will take much longer than I thought, then want my computer to e.g. go to sleep when it is done
