Brendan Jurd wrote: [ email paragraphs reordered.]
> I seem to recall there was some discussion of an "auto" mode in the > original wrapping thread, but if there was any meaningful conclusion I > lost it in amongst the width detection flame war. I wasn't going to bring up the 'auto' idea yet because it might confuse things, but I guess I should address it now. "wrapped" format doesn't wrap if the column headings don't fit the screen width _without_ wrapping (it then uses 'aligned'). My idea was for an 'auto' format mode to use wrapped, or expanded if wrapped can't be displayed. > > The attached patch uses wrapped format for \d* output if the current > > output format is 'aligned'. It certainly helps the \df and \dT because > > those outputs have normally narrow values with a few wide values that > > cause aligned output to be much too wide. The downside of the patch is > > that you can no longer get 'aligned' output for \d* commands anymore > > because there is no way to know if the user specified 'aligned' or if > > they are just using the default. > > > > Doesn't this suggest that we need an "auto" formatting mode which has > the semantics "let psql decide what format mode I want"? The big problem is unless we default psql to 'auto' we can't know if they really want 'aligned', 'wrapped', or whatever looks good on the screen, 'auto'. > Then the people who object to wrapped mode can just set formatting to > aligned explicitly and be done with it. Right, but 'wrapped' is kind of a dramatic change so we have to be sure most people wanted 'wrapped' (or 'auto'). I think the way we did the detection defaults will help because a default of 'auto' will only affect screen output, by default. -- Bruce Momjian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
