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Title: Terminal trick - progress indicator in the task manager
Shmerl 13 hours ago
KDE's konsole has a neat hidden trick. You can set progress indicator in task manager's entry for the terminal that will be affected by the tab where you do it.

Using this escape sequence:

printf "\x1b]9;4;1;70\a"

Sets the progress to 70% for example.

To reset:

printf "\x1b]9;4;0\a"

I discovered it with neovim using it to show progress of updating plugins with vim.pack

The feature is called OSC 9;4 if you want to get more info about it.

Last edited by Shmerl on 12 May 2026 at 1:28 am UTC
Ehvis 3 hours ago
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That's actually pretty cool. Is that just Konsole or is this implemented by others as well?

Need to remember it. Let's test the bookmark feature for the first time!
whizse 2 hours ago
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Really neat!

Seems to work in vte terminals (gnome-terminal & ptyxis), but it was a little bit fiddly. I had to use
 echo -ne "\e]9;4;1;75\e\\"

State 3, the indeterminate/pulsing state doesn't seem to be implemented though.
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