Pulsar

Pulsar is a text-based, dynamic dashboard that lets processes communicate their status. Jobs can be created, updated, and completed asynchronously, and update in-place. This is intended for use in Elixir applications that run as command line tools.

Jobs have a lifecycle: they are created, periodically updated, and eventually completed. Whenever a job is updated, it is highlighted for one second using bright, bold text.

In the above demo, completed jobs were also set to status :ok, which displays them in green.

Completed jobs bubble up above non-completed jobs (this may change in a later release as it can be a bit disconcerting).

API Documentation

Installation

The package can be installed by adding pulsar to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:pulsar, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Limitations

Pulsar doesn't know the dimensions of the screen; large numbers of jobs in a short window will not render correctly. Likewise, long lines that wrap will cause incorrect output.

Pulsar is currently hard-coded for xterm; in the future it will use the terminal capabilities database to identify what command codes generate each effect.

Pulsar doesn't have any way to prevent other output to the console; that will cause confusing output unless Pulsar.pause/0 and Pulsar.resume/0 are used.

License

Released under the Apache Software License 2.0.