What is psleep?

psleep is a command-line tool written in Rust that works like the standard sleep command on Linux and macOS, but adds a visible progress bar so you can see how much time is left. The standard sleep command just pauses for a set amount of time with no output, which leaves you wondering whether your script is still running. psleep solves that by showing a live animation in the terminal while the wait is happening. You can specify durations in natural formats like "1m30s" for one minute and thirty seconds, or "2h5m" for two hours and five minutes, in addition to plain seconds. There are several visual styles to choose from, including a standard bar, a block-fill bar, a dot-based animation, an emoji version, and a spinner that counts down the remaining time. You can set a preferred style via a command-line flag or an environment variable so you do not have to repeat it every time. On terminals that support a standard called OSC 9,4, psleep can also send progress to the terminal's own native display, such as the tab bar in Windows Terminal or the taskbar progress indicator. This is the default behavior. If your terminal does not support it, or if you prefer the in-terminal bar, you can disable the native mode with a flag. The tool clears its progress bar when the sleep finishes, so it fits cleanly into shell scripts and pipelines without leaving stray output. Pre-built binaries are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and you can also install it from the Rust package registry using cargo install psleep or via Homebrew on macOS.