Over the years I've repeatedly run into the problem that my projects end up outputting a lot of logging text, when running tests, when doing build steps, etc. But most of the logfile is uninteresting if the tests pass, the build steps succeed, etc. Normally the only interesting part is pass/fail and maybe how many subtasks were run.

I finally got around to extracting a text-based utility that makes this more standard. All of my projects now use it.

It's really simple. Every process or script that has a lot of steps simply outputs those steps in a standard format on specially-marked lines (beginning with ##), and then that output is piped a utility that parses those lines and displays up-to-date progress as the process runs. There are a lot of different modes, e.g. to output one character per subtask, one line, or to do all-in-one line interactive display.

I've found this very useful over the past several years and maybe others will too.