NO_PROGRESS

Inspired by the NO_COLOR standard, this specification describes a NO_PROGRESS standard for disabling command-line spinners and progress bars outputs. While this output can be useful, some terminal outputs do not handle the ANSI escape code sequence (\033[2K or \x1b[2K) for clearing an entire line. Additionally, tools such as GitHub Workflows cannot handle command-line spinners and progress bars altogether.

As such, the informal standard proposed in 2026 to account for this is thus:

Command-line software which adds ANSI spinners and/or progress bars to its output by default should check for a NO_PROGRESS environment variable that, when present and not an empty string (regardless of its value), prevents the display of ANSI spinners and/or progress bars.

By adopting this standard, environments that require no spinners and/or progress bars can export NO_PROGRESS=1 to their shell's environment and automatically disable these spinners and progress bars by default in all supported software.

Example Integration

// Access the available environment variable.
const no_progress = process.env.NO_PROGRESS;
 
// We only enable spinners and progress bars if "undefined" or explicitly "0".
const enabled = no_progress === undefined || no_progress === '0';

Adherent Libraries

Frameworks that currently adhere to the NO_PROGRESS standard:

No libraries so far...

Adherent Software

Executables that currently adhere to the NO_PROGRESS standard: