Use silent mode and no verbosity.
Customized the compilation printing until I was happy with it. ;) Now, the only problem is that we obviously don't want all Rake files to have a bunch of hardwired ANSI codes in them so we have to find a way to have some "common" parts. I did try the approach of loading all Rakefiles into the same Ruby runtime, but it didn't work that well since the current working directory wasn't properly changed. Could look into the ideas suggested by http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1686779/multifile-rake-build sometime; I just got the feeling that they didn't 100% apply to our use case when I checked it today...