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Even if it does not cause any performance issues, I dislike it. If the thing runs in terminal, it should be expect to be used in a script thus it would be better to make no assumptions of terminal capabilities and leave the fancy part to external tools, if one is interested. I always hate systemctl's piping to a pager by default. "Do one thing, do it well", don't try to surprise users with fanciness because at work we don't like surprises.

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In practice I've had overwhelming feedback praising our use of spinners in the Heroku CLI and not a single complaint I can think of. In fact, I've had more praise for adding spinners and color than any other change we've put in over 4+ years of development.

That said, you need to be careful. Don't use a spinner if it's not a tty or TERM=dumb. Do use it in some CI environments that support it (Travis, CircleCI) That handles all the issues we've seen and everyone seems to be happy.

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