textprogressbar

A lightweight, customizable text progress bar to monitor the execution of a long task, such as a loop with large number of iterations, in Matlab's command line.

Careful:

• No printing while using the progress bar.
• When monitoring a loop, if each round is too fast, the bar rendering may incur too much of an overhead. Use the optional updatestep parameter to adjust how frequently the bar should be re-rendered.

What does it look like?

Examples

Use the bar right out of the box:

n = 150; % the size of the loop (total number of items tracked)

% Initialize progress bar and get handle:
upd = textprogressbar(n);

for i = 1:n
    % Perform a task (Caution! No printing when using the progres bar):
    pause(0.05);
    
    % Update (re-render) the progress bar:
    upd(i);
end

or customize it to make life a little better:

n = 150;

% Initialize progress bar with optinal parameters:
upd = textprogressbar(n, 'barlength', 20, ...
                         'updatestep', 10, ...
                         'startmsg', 'Waiting... ',...
                         'endmsg', ' Yay!', ...
                         'showbar', true, ...
                         'showremtime', true, ...
                         'showactualnum', true, ...
                         'barsymbol', '+', ...
                         'emptybarsymbol', '-');
for i = 1:n
   pause(0.05);
   upd(i);
end

How To Use

Download the source from here, unzip, and place the extracted folder in your Matlab path (or just place textprogressbar.m in your project directory, i.e., in the same directory as the script that will be using the bar. It might help to also see here.

Other

Implementation details

Textprogressbar is implemented using Matlab's nested-function feature: invoking textprogressbar(n) initializes and renders an array divided into fixe length blocks (corresponding to the visible segments, e.g., the bar or the percentage of completed items) and returns a handle (pointer) to a nested function which can be used to update and re-render the progress bar. Certain architectural choices were made to address inconsistencies between the command line of Matlab's -desktop and -nodesktop environment.

Why not an Object Oriented approach? Although Matlab supports an OO architecture, I found it to be much slower compared to the nested-function implementation; the objective is to have a light-weight progress bar that allows monitoring the progress of a long task without incurring a substantial overhead.

Tested

In OSX and Ubuntu Linux on Matlab 2013b and 2015b.

Bugs, comments, suggestions?

Shoot me an email at megas@utexas.edu.