tqrex

A progress bar that lets you play the Chrome T-Rex game in your terminal.

Your long-running script doesn't have to be boring. tqrex wraps any iterable in a full T-Rex side-scroller — jump cacti, dodge birds, rack up a high score — while your real work happens in the background. When the task finishes the game keeps running until you decide to quit.

Features

• Zero runtime dependencies — pure Python standard library
• Drop-in tqdm replacement — track() has the same call signature
• Progress context manager — for manual update control
• 60 FPS physics — faithful gravity, jump arc, and speed curve from the original Chrome dino
• Autoplay AI — built-in geometric look-ahead controller (autoplay=True)
• Double-buffered renderer — flicker-free diff-based redraw, single write per frame
• Cross-platform — macOS, Linux, Windows (ANSI terminal required)
• Python 3.11+

Installation

pip install tqrex

Or for local development:

git clone https://github.com/mikhail-samoilov/tqrex
cd tqrex
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Quickstart

Drop-in replacement for tqdm

import tqrex
from playgress import track

for item in track(range(100), description="Processing"):
    tqrex.sleep(0.05)

Any iterable works

files = ["data_001.csv", "data_002.csv", ...]

for f in track(files, description="Crunching files"):
    crunch(f)

Manual control with the Progress context manager

from playgress import Progress

steps = ["Download", "Extract", "Build", "Install"]
with Progress(total=len(steps), description="Installing") as p:
    for step in steps:
        p.set_description(f"Step: {step}")
        run(step)
        p.update(1)

Let the AI play for you

for epoch in track(range(200), description="Training", autoplay=True):
    train_one_epoch(epoch)

Keyboard controls

Note: The game keeps running after all items are processed so you can finish your current run. Press Q when you're done.