On 12 December 2017 at 13:04, Jeremy Finzel <finz...@gmail.com> wrote: > FWIW I am +1 in favor of not overcomplicating the special psql commands and > keep to the "\" standard.
I find the general rule of \ starts a client command and anything else starts a server command to be very good to begin with. The 'help' is an ugly exception to the rule and I wouldn't like to see it expanding. If it were up to me, I'd rename 'help' to '\help' and add '\q' to the initial welcome message. Of course, that wouldn't be accepted and it wouldn't solve the SO statistics or the OP's complaint. It's been already established that we're now trying to cater to a special kind of user - not the one who doesn't want/have time to read the docs - but the one who didn't even read the start message or who read it and forgot what it was after a screen full of content has passed, then went to SO instead of the docs. (I'm not criticizing - just trying to paint a clear picture of the goal here.) And since I view the lonely exit|quit in an uglier solution still, how about this idea: Nano keeps a cheatsheet of commands on the bottom; and it's regarded as a fairly good editor for newcomers. Some shells have a right-hand side status bar. And even vim these days shows several lines of explanation of :q if you open it alone. If psql had a right-hand side status bar that defaulted to a short cheatsheet-like message like the initial "type 'help' for help and '\q' to quit" (perhaps empty if started with quiet), then it would follow new users around on every new command, so they would always know how to quit or ask for help. I think the message mentioning '\q' instead of 'quit' is important anyway since it works even on a dirty buffer. And experienced users already set their status lines anyway, so they would have an extra status space on the right for general things; perhaps RPROMPT, as zsh calls it. I'd rather have SO fill with "how to change the right prompt in psql" than "how to quit psql" since then we're talking about different user profiles. Tureba - Arthur Nascimento