Re: [HACKERS] proposal: psql command \graw

2017-12-01 16:36 GMT+01:00 Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>:

> On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 12:16 AM, Michael Paquier
> <michael(dot)paquier(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 12:57 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
> >> 2017-11-10 16:38 GMT+01:00 Fabien COELHO <coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr>:
> >>> So I switched the patch to "ready for committer".
> >>
> >> Thank you very much
> >
> > Patch moved to CF 2018-01 with same status: ready for committer.
>
> I vote to reject this patch. It doesn't do anything that you can't
> already do; it just adds some syntactic sugar. And that syntactic
> sugar saves only a handful of keystrokes. If you want unaligned,
> tuples-only mode, you can set it in 5 keystrokes:
>
> rhaas=# \a\t
> Output format is unaligned.
> Tuples only is on.
>
>
When you don't want to see column names, then it is true.

For some usage - like printing via gnuplot you would to see column names -
and it cannot be done with current settings.

> If you use this command, it takes 4 keystrokes; instead of ending your
> command with a semicolon (1 character) you end it with \graw (5
> characters).
>
> Now, granted, \graw lets you set those options for a single command
> rather than persistently, but I'm just not very interested in having a
> bunch of \g<whatever> options that enable various combinations of
> options. Soon we'll have a thicket of \g variants that force
> whichever combinations of options particular developers like to use,
> and if \graw is any indication, the \g<whatever> variant won't
> necessarily look anything like the normal way of setting those
> options. And that's not easy to fix, either: \graw could be spelled
> \gat since it forces \a on and \t on, but somebody's bound to
> eventually propose a variant that sets an option that has no
> single-character shorthand.
>
> I'm not going to be bitterly unhappy if somebody else decides to
> commit this, but to me it looks like it gains us very little.
>

This feature marginal, but I don't thing so it is without any value - It is
well usable with gnuplot - and I hope so not only MacOS users will have
terminal with graphic possibilities - and then with this feature can
emulate notebook interface,

Regards

Pavel

>
> --
> Robert Haas
> EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
> The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
>