How to see progress of download started in the terminal
Another option is to install wget (e.g. with Homebrew), which has more user-friendly defaults than curl, including displaying an ASCII-art progress bar.

For example:

&gt; brew install wget
&gt; wget google.com
Saving to: 'index.html'
...
index.html                      [ &lt;=&gt;              ]  10.32K  --.-KB/s in 0.001s

2016-05-17 12:55:06 (8.08 MB/s) - 'index.html' saved [10563]