I have such mixed feelings about Click; I've reached the point of using it so much that I now hate it. Which I think probably means that it's great but only as as stopgap until you learn how to bend argparse to your will. It's just too magic, too much global state, and too much spooky action at a distance.

I wasn't aware of Click, it looks promising.

For reference, it's a backronym for 'Command Line Interface Creation Kit': https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/8.0.x/

I use tqdm (with argparse) in a pyinstaller packaged exe. 5-stars - Its great! I call the exe from Java to do some ML and forward the tqdm progress and status messages to a Swing progress bar. It makes the user experience seamless. Depending on the task and the user's settings the tool usually takes about 7-8 seconds(including the PyInstaller extract) but it can also take up to a minute. When its 7-8 seconds the progress messages fly by and the tool feels snappy. When its 50-60 seconds the users are very grateful for the progress bar. Meanwhile I can develop and test the tool from the command-line and see progress info and when I want to run the ML code in Jupyter notebooks the progress bars can still be made to work.

Python Fire is my favorite tool for a dead simple way to create a CLI without using ugly argparse

does click.progressbar use tqdm underneath?

In Click projects I usually use that rather than tqdm directly.