Live render only a portion of a line?

[cswartzvi]

Hello!

Question:
Can I live render only a portion of a line without overwriting existing text?

Background:
I am developing a wrapper around a third-party application and would like to use a Spinner. I have used console.status in the past so I started there:

with console.status("Searching", spinner='point') as status:
    run_third_party_command()

Unfortunately, the third-party command is multi-threaded, and moderately resource heavy, so the the entire line ●∙∙ Searching flickers. I didn't think it was a big deal, but some users complained that the flickering text was distracting. I tried to confine the flickering to just the Spinner by naively moving it to the end of the line:

columns = Columns(["Searching", Spinner("point"))
with Live(columns) as live:
    run_third_party_command()

However, as mentioned in #1314, this does not solve the problem because Live redraws the entire renderable on each update, so the flickering text persisted. I then tried to move the text out of the Live context:

console = Console()
console.print("Searching", end="")
with Live(Spinner("point"), console=console) as live:
    run_third_party_command()

However, while this initially prints Searching on the line, it is immediately overwritten by the spinning ●∙∙. Is there any way to place the live rendered spinner on the same line as static text?

Thanks for reading this far!
Chuck