And shapes, though you can get that with some ASCII art as well.

I've had a few scripts some time ago that took a long time to run, so I wanted a progress indicator I could see from across the room - that way I could play some guitar while monitoring the computer doing stuff in the evening.

Hence, the log messages got prefixed with tags like:

  >     ]
  >>    ] # normal progress
  /!\/!\] # it had to engage in a workaround
    x_x ] # if it had to stop.