[WorldMaker]

I've wondered for a bit why in the Unix philosophy there isn't a standard /dev/progress or something for somewhat unified progress reporting already. It seems something that should be easy to standardize: make it append-only and take maybe a task name and a double [0, 1] (maybe, maybe optionally x of y counts, but a single double should be all you need). Let the terminal, the shell, and/or the GUI figure out how it wants to display things.

All of the major OSes today have some sort of dock/taskbar/activity panel standardized progress reporting API that is basically that simple, seems interesting we haven't pushed that idea back into the terminal. Makes you wonder what other sorts of GUI era pseudo-devices might be useful to add to Unix. In the other direction, imagine if some of these tools had been standardized as real devices in past terminals, like using something fun like an analog meter for progress operations.