Re: psql: Activate pager only for height, not width

Re: Jeff Janes 2017-05-29 <CAMkU=1wBpDrHdjSvABtFRB1TguC+LBJJwpV79kxyMOkeUi2B3Q(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com>
> > Usually I turn the pager off completely, and only switch it on when I am
> > about to execute something that will return many rows, but what I'd really
> > like is some way to tell psql to activate the pager as normal for height,
> > but to ignore width. My first thought was an alternate mode to \pset pager
> > -- to {'on' | 'off' | 'always'} we could add 'height'.

This bugs me pretty often as well. Height seems to be a more sensible
trigger; maybe not by default, but I could imagine setting that as
default in my .psqlrc.

> > Another option is to add the ability to specify the number of columns
> > which psql considers "too wide", analogous to pager_min_lines. I could
> > then set pager_min_cols to something around 150 which would work nicely for
> > my situation.

Oh interesting, I didn't know about pager_min_lines. That sounds
useful as well. +1 on the analogous pager_min_cols option.

> (You can configure the pager not to redraw the screen when exited, but I
> want it to redraw the screen after looking at 10,000 rows, just not after
> looking ten rows, one of which was 170 characters wide)

Another thing you can do which has somewhat solved the above issue for
me is PAGER="less -S" which tells less not to wrap lines but let the
user scroll left/right using the arrow keys.

Christoph