My personal bet is that from the very beginning, Cassandra was more "number-centric" and right alignment just made more sense back then, considering strings as an afterthought. Another explanation is that nobody actually put any work to it to distinguish strings and numbers and it stayed like that. I can definitely see the value in left alignment for strings. Whole system of written "latin" language is to do it from left to right. Arabic is from right to left and there it makes more sense but that is imho absolute minority in practice so left alignment just makes more sense to me overall in every situation (for strings)
________________________________________ From: Derek Chen-Becker <de...@chen-becker.org> Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2024 17:15 To: dev@cassandra.apache.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] CQLSH should left-align numbers, right-align text (CASSANDRA-19150) EXTERNAL EMAIL - USE CAUTION when clicking links or attachments In the ticket itself there's an example of left aligned being better for prefix strings (e.g. fully qualified class names), and I suspect this is similarly useful for other things like file paths, etc. I would also agree with Stefan that it would be nice to know why the current convention was chosen in the first place. Cheers, Derek On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 8:18 AM Brad <bscho...@gmail.com<mailto:bscho...@gmail.com>> wrote: Derek, I'm proposing a switch or blanket change to a convention of right aligned text and left aligned numbers in CQLSH. I took a look at two other examples, Excel and Postgres shell and that's how they work when displaying tabular data. The Jira was originally to make right or left alignment an option, but making it configurable seems less useful than choosing a better standard. On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 9:58 AM Derek Chen-Becker <de...@chen-becker.org<mailto:de...@chen-becker.org>> wrote: Just to clarify, per the ticket you're proposing a configuration option to control this on a per-column basis, correct? Your email makes it sound like a blanket change. Cheers, Derek On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 7:34 AM Brad <bscho...@gmail.com<mailto:bscho...@gmail.com>> wrote: CQLSH currently left-aligns all output, affecting both numbers and text. While this works well for numbers, a better approach adopted by many is to left align numbers and right align text. For example, both Excel and Postgres shell use the later: psql # select * from employee; empid | name | dept -------+---------+------------ 1 | Clark | Sales 200 | Dave | Accounting 33 | Johnson | Sales while CQLSH simply left aligns all the columns cqlsh> select * from employee; empid | dept | name -------+------------+--------- 33 | Sales | Johnson 1 | Sales | Clark 200 | Accounting | Dave Left aligned text looks much worse on text values which share common prefixes cqlsh> select * from system_views.system_properties limit 7 ; name | value --------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------- JAVA_HOME | /Users/brad/.jenv/versions/17 cassandra.jmx.local.port | 7199 cassandra.logdir | /usr/local/cassandra-5.0-beta1/bin/../logs cassandra.storagedir | /usr/local/cassandra-5.0-beta1/bin/../data com.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate | false com.sun.management.jmxremote.password.file | /etc/cassandra/jmxremote.password io.netty.transport.estimateSizeOnSubmit | false The Jira CASSANDRA-19150<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-19150> discusses this in further detail with some additional examples. I wanted to raise the issue here to propose changing CQLSH to right-align text while continue to left-align numbers. Regards, Brad Schoening [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/ACg8ocIyewytSUXGiqiyXhMz6n1Kw3G3R_QAsy09jFQvse8HqQ=s80-p-mo] ReplyForward Add reaction -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Derek Chen-Becker | | GPG Key available at https://keybase.io/dchenbecker<https://keybase.io/dchenbecker> and | | https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=derek%40chen-becker.org<https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=derek%40chen-becker.org> | | Fngrprnt: EB8A 6480 F0A3 C8EB C1E7 7F42 AFC5 AFEE 96E4 6ACC | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Derek Chen-Becker | | GPG Key available at https://keybase.io/dchenbecker<https://keybase.io/dchenbecker> and | | https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=derek%40chen-becker.org<https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=derek%40chen-becker.org> | | Fngrprnt: EB8A 6480 F0A3 C8EB C1E7 7F42 AFC5 AFEE 96E4 6ACC | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
