Twisters

Display multiple simultaneous animated spinners in node terminal applications

• BYO-colors (supports chalk, colorette, kleur, kuler, etc. but depends on none of them)
• Compatible with any spinner from cli-spinners
• Supports fullwidth characters
• Simple and flexible API
• Lots of examples
• Written in TypeScript

Inspired by spinnies and ora

Installation

npm install twisters

or

yarn add twisters

TypeScript

If you use TypeScript, @types/node must also be installed:

npm install -D @types/node

or

yarn add -D @types/node

Usage

const chalk = require('chalk');
const { Twisters } = require('twisters');

// Create a twisters instance to manage messages
const twisters = new Twisters();

// Add a message (messages are active by default)
twisters.put('a', {
  text: 'Hello world!'
});

setTimeout(() => {
  // Update the message
  twisters.put('a', {
    // Text can optionally be styled with any ANSI library
    text: chalk.yellow('This text has been updated')
  });
}, 2000);

setTimeout(() => {
  // Update the message again
  twisters.put('a', {
    // Spinner is not shown when active is false
    active: false,
    // Display a yellow prefix before the text
    text: `${chalk.yellow('+')} Done (4s)`
  });
}, 4000);

Result

Options

The Twisters class constructor takes an optional options argument. Defaults are used if corresponding values are not defined, which means this:

const { Twisters } = require('twisters');

const twisters = new Twisters();

is equivalent to this:

const {
  Twisters,
  LineBuffer,
  terminalSupportsUnicode,
  dots,
  dashes
} = require('twisters');

const twisters = new Twisters({
  spinner: terminalSupportsUnicode() ? dots : dashes,
  flushInactive: true,
  pinActive: false,
  messageDefaults: {
    active: true,
    removed: false,
    render: (message, frame) => {
      const { active, text } = message;
      return active && frame ? `${frame} ${text}` : text;
    }
  },
  buffer: new LineBuffer({
    EOL: '\n',
    disable: !!process.env.CI,
    discardStdin: true,
    handleSigint: true,
    stream: process.stderr,
    truncate: true,
    wordWrap: false
  })
});

See the documentation for details:

• Message
• TwistersOptions
• LineBufferOptions

Known Limitations

Care must be taken with messages that contain tab (\t) characters. See tabStop for details.

Examples

See the examples-js and examples-ts packages

Documentation

See API Documentation

Development

See README in the repository root

License

MIT

Author

Adam Jarret