Introducing pin: A Minimal CLI Spinner for Go

For a while, I was frustrated with existing CLI spinner libraries in Go—they either brought in too many dependencies or simply didn’t meet the needs of my projects. That’s why I built pin: a lightweight, dependency-free spinner library that does exactly what you need, without any extra fuss.

What is pin?

pin is a simple terminal spinner for your CLI applications written in Go. It supports customizable spinner colors, text colors, prefixes, and even dynamic message updates. The goal was to create something minimal that leverages only the Go standard library, making it easy to integrate and maintain.

Key Features

• Customizable: Easily adjust spinner colors, text colors, prefixes, separators, and more.
• Dynamic Updates: Update the spinner message on the fly.
• Dependency-Free: No third-party packages—just Go.
• Piped Output Handling: Automatically disables animations when the output isn’t attached to a TTY (e.g., when using ./myapp | tee output.txt), preventing control characters from cluttering your logs.

Installation

go get github.com/yarlson/pin

Quick Start

Here’s a simple example to get you started:

package main

import (
    "context"
    "time"

    "github.com/yarlson/pin"
)

func main() {
    p := pin.New("Loading...",
        pin.WithSpinnerColor(pin.ColorCyan),
        pin.WithTextColor(pin.ColorYellow),
    )
    cancel := p.Start(context.Background())
    defer cancel()

    // Simulate work
    time.Sleep(3 * time.Second)

    p.UpdateMessage("Almost done...")
    time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)

    p.Stop("Done!")
}

Final Thoughts

If you’ve ever spent more time wrestling with a library than building your project, give pin a try. It’s a simple tool that just works—no extra dependencies, no unnecessary complexity, just what you need for your CLI applications.

Check out the source code and contribute on GitHub.

Happy coding!