Symfony News

New in Symfony 5.1: Cursor control

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();

        // 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 all the output from the current line
$cursor->clearLine();

// clears all the output from the current line after the current 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();
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Source: https://symfony.com/blog

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