Progress indication for long operations

A CLI that sits silent for ten seconds during a deploy looks frozen. Users hit Ctrl+C, corrupt state, and open a support ticket. Progress indicators on stderr — spinners, counters, bars — tell the user the tool is alive without polluting stdout for scripts. Writing spinners to stdout is the opposite failure: mytool deploy | tee log captures terminal control sequences into the log file, and every subsequent cat log flickers the terminal.

Wrap operations over two seconds (network calls, installs, file scans) with a spinner or progress bar routed to stderr, and suppress when !process.stderr.isTTY. In src/cli/commands/deploy.ts:

import ora from 'ora'
const spinner = ora({ text: 'Deploying...', stream: process.stderr }).start()
try { await deploy(); spinner.succeed('Deployed') }
catch (e) { spinner.fail('Failed'); throw e }

• ID: cli-quality.io-behavior.progress-indication

• Severity: low

• What to look for: Enumerate every long-running operation in the CLI (network calls, file processing, installations). For each, identify operations that may take more than 1-2 seconds (network requests, file processing, build steps). Check that these operations show progress feedback — a spinner (ora, cli-spinners, tqdm), a progress bar, or periodic status messages. Verify that progress output goes to stderr (not stdout). Check that progress indicators are suppressed when stdout is not a TTY.

• Pass criteria: Long-running operations provide visible progress feedback. Progress output goes to stderr. Progress is suppressed or simplified when not running in a TTY — 100% of operations taking over 2 seconds must show progress feedback. Report: "X long-running operations found, all Y show progress indication."

• Fail criteria: Long-running operations produce no output until completion (the user sees a hanging terminal), or progress output goes to stdout (corrupts piped data).

• Skip (N/A) when: All commands complete in under 1-2 seconds (no network calls, no large file processing). All checks skip when no CLI entry point is detected.

• Detail on fail: "'deploy' command makes 5 API calls with no progress indication — terminal appears frozen for 10+ seconds" or "Spinner from ora writes to stdout by default — will corrupt piped output"

• Remediation: Users need feedback that the CLI is working, not frozen:

  // Node.js — ora spinner on stderr
  import ora from 'ora'
  const spinner = ora({ text: 'Deploying...', stream: process.stderr }).start()
  try {
    await deploy()
    spinner.succeed('Deployed successfully')
  } catch (err) {
    spinner.fail('Deployment failed')
    throw err
  }
  

  # Python — tqdm or click.progressbar to stderr
  import click
  with click.progressbar(files, label='Processing', file=sys.stderr) as bar:
      for f in bar:
          process_file(f)