Everaldo Canuto wrote: > Oracle's sqlplus uses "quit" or "exit" and MySQL client can be exited using > "quit" and "exit" but for compatibility with psql, it also supports "\q" > and "\quit".
When looking at the most popular postgres questions on stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/postgresql?sort=votes the first one (most up-voted) happens to be: "How to exit from PostgreSQL command line utility: psql" now at 430k views and 1368 upvotes. Independently of the syntax-compatibility with other tools, it can be a miserable experience for people who almost never use psql to type "quit" or "exit" after they're done with whatever they wanted to do, and nothing happens except a tiny change in the prompt. Implementing it is easy, but it might be a hard sell for the project because it creates a precedent. The next question in that list is "PostgreSQL DESCRIBE TABLE", so why not implement "desc tablename;" as a synonym for "\d tablename"? The question after that is "Show tables in PostgreSQL", so why not implement "show tablename;"? Well, this one is impossible because SHOW is already a SQL command that does something else, so that's already the end of that road to compatibility. Personally I'm +1 on accepting the additional "exit" and "quit" as synonyms for \q, to comply with the "Do What I Mean" UX rule, rather than just compatibility with other tools. I guess this is why "help" is already a synonym of \h. Best regards, -- Daniel Vérité PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org Twitter: @DanielVerite