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, redirect STDERR to STDOUT by using 2>&1 in your command:

my-command 2>&1 | spacer