Why was the number "progress bar" removed for fread?

[eantonya]

Just curious why the number progress bar was removed and replaced with the "graphical" progress bar?

Seems to me that this representation shows less info + is fragile to hitting Enter.

[HughParsonage]

My fault: #2481

#2481 (comment)

[mattdowle]

Maybe the number progress can be brought back. It relies on printing \r. I thought the \r might have been causing the instability as there were historical reports of \r being unstable on RStudio. But it turned out to be unrelated so could try \r again. The current progress bar just prints an extra = each time and has no \r.

[eantonya]

@mattdowle I personally don't care about the visual representation, and if people think this is prettier - that's fine with me, but maybe we can have the number printed as well below it or next to it to have more informative output.

[mattdowle]

@eantonya whoa - where did I mention pretty? I did the = to avoid the \r, that was all. Nothing to do with pretty. I started my reply above positively and explained the background to it too. That bug in fread was fraught and lasted weeks related to the multi-threading. It appeared to be Windows-only RStudio-only but turned out to be neither. At the end of the day there is a thread printing that progress inside a parallel region, and calling the R API (printing) is not thread-safe. I think it should be fine to try the \r again but at one point I thought it wouldn't be possible to have any type of text output at all inside the parallel region.

[eantonya]

@mattdowle haha, I didn't mean you personally find it pretty - I was simply attempting to cover the case of some people enjoying the current representation. But perhaps I've misjudged, and that group is of size 0.

[mattdowle]

yep I can't imagine anyone finds it useful. No bounds are even printed so you don't know how many = are going to printed -- you just know it is progressing and that's all. We can try the % again.