Spectre.Console 0.55.0 released!

Version 0.55.0 of Spectre.Console has been released!

This release brings new features, performance improvements, bug fixes, and some important architectural changes.

New Spectre.Console.Ansi Library

One of the biggest changes in this release is the introduction of Spectre.Console.Ansi, a new standalone library for writing ANSI escape sequences to the terminal without taking a full dependency on Spectre.Console.

This makes it easy to add ANSI support to lightweight tools and libraries where pulling in the full Spectre.Console package would be overkill. Spectre.Console itself now depends on this library internally.

We've also added some nice convenience methods for the .NET Console class:

using Spectre.Console.Ansi;
  
Console.Markup("[yellow]Hello[/] ");
Console.MarkupLine("[blue]World[/]");
  
Console.Ansi(writer => writer
    .BeginLink("https://spectreconsole.net", linkId: 123)
    .Decoration(Decoration.Bold | Decoration.Italic)
    .Foreground(Color.Yellow)
    .Write("Spectre Console")
    .ResetStyle()
    .EndLink());

Style Is Now a Struct

Style has been converted from a class to a struct, and link/URL information has been extracted into a separate Link type. This improves allocation performance, especially in rendering-heavy scenarios, but is a breaking change for code that relies on reference semantics.

Progress Improvements

The Progress widget received a lot of love in this release. It now uses TimeProvider instead of the wall clock, making it significantly easier to write deterministic tests. ProgressTask has a new Tag property for attaching arbitrary metadata, and you can now override the global hide-when-completed behavior on individual tasks. Tasks can also be removed from the progress context entirely.

Speed calculations have been improved with configurable max sampling age and sample count, giving you more control over how responsive or smooth the speed readout is. Speed calculations for stopped tasks have been fixed, and indeterminate tasks no longer show a meaningless time estimate.

Prompt Enhancements

Prompts now accept a CancellationToken, making it possible to cancel a waiting prompt programmatically. TextPrompt default values can now be edited by the user instead of being accepted or rejected as a whole. There is also a new option to clear the prompt line after the user provides input.

Tables and Rendering

Table body rows now support column spans, and a new minimal border style has been added for a cleaner look. The Canvas widget gained half-block support, which enables double the vertical resolution when rendering graphics. JsonText now has a configurable indentation depth. Various performance improvements have also been made to Markup instantiation and formatting.

Bug Fixes

A memory leak related to Segment has been fixed, along with Segment.SplitLines ignoring multiple consecutive line breaks. A crash in SegmentShape.Calculate when the lines list was empty has been resolved. Interactive console detection when output is redirected now works correctly, and table expand now properly respects fixed column widths. Truncation and overflow handling for fullwidth characters has been corrected, and locking performance on .NET 9.0+ has been improved.

Breaking Changes

This release contains several breaking changes. Please review the following before upgrading.

Style is now a struct. Code relying on reference semantics such as null checks or reference equality will need to be updated. Related to this, link and URL information has moved from Style to a new Link type, so any code that reads or writes links through Style will need to be adjusted.

Several previously obsoleted members have been removed. The Alignment property on Calendar, Table, and Grid, as well as the Render extension method, no longer exist. AnsiConsoleFactory has been made static and internal, so code that instantiated this class directly will need an alternative approach.

Finally, ANSI output is now disabled when stdout or stderr is redirected. This is a behavior change: output that previously included ANSI escape codes when piped or redirected will now be plain text.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/spectreconsole/spectre.console/compare/0.54.0...0.55.0