spacer is a simple CLI tool to insert spacers when command output stops.

If you're the type of person that habitually presses enter a few times in your log tail to know where the last request ended and the new one begins, this tool is for you!

With Homebrew:

brew install spacer

Direct from Cargo:

cargo install spacer

By default, spacer outputs a spacer after 1 second with no output. You can change this with the --after flag.

tail -f some.log | spacer --after 5

--after accepts a number of seconds, and allows floating point numbers for extra precision.

Some commands output most of their information on STDERR, not STDOUT. spacer only monitors STDOUT, so if you find a situation where spacer doesn't seem to be working it could be that the program you're piping from is using STDERR.

To "fix" that, pipe both STDERR to STDOUT to spacer by using |& instead of | as the pipe characters:

my-command |& spacer