Pierre du Plessis
Contributed by Pierre du Plessis in #27444

Symfony Console component provides lots of utilities to render contents in the command console, such as progress bars, tables with all kinds of styles, interactive questions, etc.

In Symfony 4.1 we even introduced output sections allowing to update different parts of the output independently. In Symfony 5.1 we've introduced another advanced feature which will allow you control the cursor.

Thanks to the new Symfony\Component\Console\Cursor class and its expressive API, you can show/hide the cursor, move it up/down/left/right, clear parts of the output, etc.

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namespace App\Command;

use Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Cursor;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;

class SomeCommand extends Command
{
    protected static $defaultName = 'app:some-command';

    // ...

    protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)
    {
        // ...

        $cursor = new Cursor($output);

        // argument for left/right is "number of columns" (1 by default)
        // argument for top/bottom is "number of rows" (1 by default)
        $cursor->moveUp(2)->moveRight();
        $cursor->moveDown();

        // move to an arbitrary (column, row) position
        $cursor->moveToPosition(7, 15);

        // you can show/hide the cursor, save/restore its position, etc.
        $cursor->savePosition()->hide();
    }
}

In addition to these methods, the new Cursor class provides several utilities to clean the output:

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// clears the entire line where the cursor is at
$cursor->clearLine();

// clears the contents of the current line starting from the cursor position
$cursor->clearLineAfter();

// clears all the output from the cursors' current position to the end of the screen.
$cursor->clearOutput();

// clears the entire screen
$cursor->clearScreen();
Published in #Living on the edge