Re: psql format output

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> It's hard to make any general judgment about how wide people's
> terminal windows are likely to be, but it is my opinion that the root
> of the problem is that \df+ just wants to display a whole lot of stuff
> - and as hackers add more function properties in the future, they're
> likely to get added in here as well. This output format doesn't scale
> nicely for that kind of thing, but it's unclear to me what would be
> any better.

I think the complaint is that even with \x mode, which fixes most
complaints of this sort, the arguments are still too wide:

-[ RECORD 1 ]-------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Schema | pg_catalog
Name | pg_copy_logical_replication_slot
Result data type | record
Argument data types | src_slot_name name, dst_slot_name name, OUT slot_name name, OUT lsn pg_lsn
Type | func
Volatility | volatile
Parallel | unsafe
Owner | postgres
Security | invoker
Access privileges |
Language | internal
Source code | pg_copy_logical_replication_slot_c
Description | copy a logical replication slot

The OP wants to fix that by inserting newlines in the "Argument data
types" column, which'd help, but it seems to me to be mostly a kluge.
That's prejudging a lot about how the output will be displayed.
A more SQL-ish way to do things would be to turn the argument items
into a set of rows. I don't quite see how to make that work here,
but maybe I'm just undercaffeinated as yet.

regards, tom lane