I will be the last one to know.

We have seen a variety of graphical wait cursor from hourglass to spinning circle.

But what about console mode.... Is this a thing?



More pattern is welcome.

There is no wait cursor in Console mode, you have to draw it yourself, erase it, and then draw again.

When display such custom cursor,
you need to do a lot of extra things when you need readline from keyboard.

Yes, you've pinpointed the issue.

But it is quite easy, given this, in .NET:

...where it doesn't pause for keypress from user.

Nope.
To handle "proper" readline, you need to check for backspace, insert / overwrite, arrow keys, some other keys such as ctrl / alt + keys...

Back in the DOS days, I hooked on interrupt 8 to change the cursor scan lines 18 times a second, bouncing it up and down. One of my first TSR program.

I suppose in modern times, it's a matter of getting something running in the background to animate it, in your current platform, be it web or console or gui.

This post has been edited by angch: Mar 17 2022, 08:54 PM

This is done quite commonly in bash scripts, there are plenty of ways to do progress indicators as well. Here's a simple spinner example

Yes, that "frames='-\|/'" is one of the popular way to do it.

When you mean progress indicator, do you mean this?

But I wonder, why do we need to read keystroke when animating a wait cursor??

Interesting, looks like everyone was a DOS master.

Like a normal progress bar you see on windows when you're transferring a file. Its quite common in command line scripts now.

After re-read the 1st post, realized this was talking about waiting cursor in console.
Not for 'waiting command cursor'





This post has been edited by flashang: Mar 19 2022, 10:43 PM

If we look at recent common application, including web, desktop gui and console app,
The waiting cursor could be progress bar,
or some text info such as xx mb/sec, xx sec / min reminding, 1 of 999 steps / processes, ...

This may give user some info for them to decide if they are willing to wait until complete or terminate it.

Animation cursor may be is OK for short waiting, but not for long waiting time.