Anything that compresses or decompresses archives, like gzip/gunzip, tar, etc.
Anything that performs longer running recursive disk activities, like du, find, etc
I’m sure there are plenty more scenarios I haven’t thought of. Though to be clear, I definitely don’t want to see this as a default enabled option in any of these.
If I’m looking at real time output, it’s because I’m doing something manually because something isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, and I’m in no mood for anything that doesn’t help me understand and address the issue.
This work is impressive. I love it. For some reason I really like “printer.” I’d be all about it for games or toys. But too many tools for real work try to do cute Unicode things or fancy colors or animations. I don’t need it on anything I will ever have to develop or troubleshoot, personally. After the first lengthy wait for a broken container to come up, I’m well over the colorful attitude.
An example of this done well would be ‘pacman’ package manager where an Easter egg can be enabled to turn the progress bar into a little Pac-Man gobbling pills. It’s not there by default, but it can be enabled if you know how.
Personally, I’m in the same camp as yourself where I’d prefer our tools didn’t have all this cutesy stuff. But people like us seem to be a dying breed.