How to display progress wheel in Terminal

Reza Niroomand

04 Mar 2025 • 1 min read

Screenshot of Terminal app showing a round progress bar in the left corner of its active tab.

Yes you read that title right. You can display a cool progress wheel in Terminal. You know Terminal, right? Right? Ok, then I just cut to the chase. The following PowerShell command will display a 50% completed wheel.

Write-Host -NoNewLine ([char]27 + "9;4;1;50" [char]7)

Terminal showing a 50% progress wheel in red

You see that tiny red half circle on the left corner of the title bar? That’s the wheel I’m talking about. Cool, right?

You can even do it in C# for your Console app.

Console.Write("\x1b]9;4;1;50\x07")

In PowerShell 7, you can simplify the command to:

Write-Host -NoNewline ("`e]9;4;1;50`a")

We are basically sending what's called OSC 9;4 sequence to the terminal. This sequence has the following syntax.

ESC ] 9 ; 4 ; <state> ; <progress> BEL

<state> is a number between 0 and 4.

0 - will hide the progress wheel.
1 - will display the progress in default mode.
2 - will display the progress in error mode.
3 - will display the progress in indeterminate mode and ignore the <progress>. This one is actually cool. You'll see the result further below.
4 - will display the progress in warning mode.

Let's try the "indeterminate" mode.

Write-Host -NoNewline ("`e]9;4;3;0`a")