Spinner, a simple library to create interactive terminal applications

Documentation

To use Spinner simply add it to your Cargo.toml

[dependencies.spinner]
version = "0.3"

Usage

There are two parts to Spinner, one part is the spinner itself, the other a simple interface to build menus.

Spinners

To use a Spinner simply go and create one using the SpinnerBuilder:

use spinner::SpinnerBuilder;
let sp = SpinnerBuilder::new("Long Running operation, please wait...".into()).start();

Will inform the user that your app currently is doing background processing. sp is a SpinnerHandle, through which you can tell the user for example how far along the process you are, or perhaps a message in between.

use spinner::SpinnerBuilder;
let sp = SpinnerBuilder::new("Long Running operation, please wait...".into()).start();
sp.message("Updating...".into());
sp.update(format!("Finished {} out of {}.", i, max));

Customizing

A spinner can be customized in three ways:

• The step duration, which is the 'refresh' period of the message.
• The format, how a given string is printed, due to limitations this is done through a closure, but it also allows more special formatting than just a format string.
• The spinner itself, which is the list of characters that change every step.

Menus

Menus are simple, type checked ways to ask the user for information.

A simple menu might look like this:

use spinner::menu::*;
let m = Menu::new(vec![
    MenuOption("First Name".into(), MenuType::Text, MenuOptional::Optional, None),
    MenuOption("Last Name".into(), MenuType::Text, MenuOptional::Required, None),
    MenuOption("Age".into(), MenuType::Integer, MenuOptional::Optional, Some(MenuValue::Integer(1))),
    MenuOption("How much Ketchup?".into(), MenuType::Float, MenuOptional::Optional, None),
]);

let results = m.display();

In results will then be an array of MenuValue, which can then be retrieved by either get_{string,int,float}, calling one of these on the wrong type will panic!. So be careful to take out the correct value out of the correct menu questions.

MenuOption

A MenuOption is a NewType. It consists of a string which will constitute the question being presented to the user. Then a MenuType, telling the checker what input is expected. If you need something else use MenuType::Text and work with that. You also have to tell whether that input is optional or not. (true=optional, false=not optional). At last, an Option<MenuValue> which allows you to put in either None, for no default value or Some<MenuValue> which will be used if the user inputs nothing.