Master Python Progress Bars: 4 Libraries & Simple GUI Integration

If you haven't used a progress bar before, you might think it adds unnecessary complexity, but adding one only takes a few lines of code. This article shows how to add progress bars in command‑line scripts and PySimpleGUI UI.

Progress

The first library is Progress . Define the number of iterations, choose a bar type, and call bar.next() each loop.

import time
from progress.bar import IncrementalBar
mylist = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
bar = IncrementalBar('Countdown', max=len(mylist))
for item in mylist:
    bar.next()
    time.sleep(1)
    bar.finish()

The resulting bar is an incremental progress bar; various bar types are supported. Documentation: https://pypi.org/project/progress/1.5/

tqdm

The tqdm library provides a similar interface with additional options.

import time
from tqdm import tqdm
mylist = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
for i in tqdm(mylist):
    time.sleep(1)

The resulting bar is shown below. Documentation: https://tqdm.github.io/

Alive Progress

alive_progress adds animated effects.

from alive_progress import alive_bar
import time
mylist = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
with alive_bar(len(mylist)) as bar:
    for i in mylist:
        bar()
        time.sleep(1)

An animated bar example is displayed below.

PySimpleGUI

Use PySimpleGUI to display a graphical progress meter.

import PySimpleGUI as sg
import time
mylist = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
for i, item in enumerate(mylist):
    sg.one_line_progress_meter('This is my progress meter!', i+1, len(mylist), '-key-')
    time.sleep(1)

A full‑window example with a progress bar and output window is also provided.

Using progress bars only requires a few lines of code and makes monitoring script execution straightforward.