beetbox / beetbox/beets

Add progress bars for long-running item- or album-level operations

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#5,711 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
feature
Dominant language
Python
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Description

### Proposed solution

There are a few Python progress bar libraries for terminal applications, including the popular [TQDM](https://tqdm.github.io/) as well as Enlighten. TQDM is great, of course, but it has the nasty habit of interacting poorly with log lines or other messages sent to STDOUT. [Enlighten](https://python-enlighten.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) handles the terminal output the way one would like it to be done - the progress bar at the bottom, and all the log messages above it with no interaction between the two.

### Objective

See related [discussion](https://github.com/beetbox/beets/discussions/5471)

#### Goals

- Add a progress bar to the bottom of the terminal for most long-running operations, particularly imports and built-in plugins.
- Provide `beets.ui.*` helper functions to make it easy for plugin developers to adopt the same progress bar, and to provide a central place for modifying behavior in the future.
- Reach out to plugin authors to invite them to adopt the progress bar in their plugins.

#### Non-goals

- Reinventing any wheels - we just want to use an off-the-shelf progress bar library, not to develop a new one ourselves.
- World peace
- Free trade
- Enlightenment

#### Anti-goals

- Global thermonuclear war

### Example screenshot

![Image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/38137ab5-2cdb-42cd-a3bf-959b6775505d)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start with the related discussion and compare TQDM with Enlighten, paying attention to terminal output alongside log messages. Map the long-running import and built-in plugin operations, then define the beets.ui helper API and adoption scope. Done means most targeted operations show a bottom-of-terminal progress bar without disrupting log output, with plugin authors able to use the helpers.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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