Re: proposal: alternative psql commands quit and exit
Everaldo Canuto wrote: > > > > postgres=> select 2+2 > >2-> help > >3-> quit > >4-> exit > > > I like it! Maybe another proposal to change PROMPT2? Thanks. Yes, I think it should be a different proposal. On closer inspection, mysql doesn't make a real effort to align prompts, the secondary prompt happens to coincide with the default primary prompt, but when it's non-default, the alignment is lost. Their secondary prompt does not seem to be configurable. By contrast PROMPT2 is fully configurable in psql. The issue of alignment is non-trivial if we wish to retain the nice-to-have property that if you copy-paste psql session in an editor, the prompting can generally be filtered out with a simple column-cut. Best regards, -- Daniel Vérité PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org Twitter: @DanielVerite
Re: proposal: alternative psql commands quit and exit
Tom Lane wrote: > The typical interaction I'd foresee is more like > > postgres=> select 2+2 (user forgets semicolon) > postgres-> help > postgres-> quit > postgres-> exit A part of this is due to the default PROMPT2 being too similar to PROMPT1. The significance of '=' turning to '-' is easily lost on newbies. By comparison, the mysql client seems a bit more intuitive for this, with this presentation: mysql> select 2+2 -> help -> quit -> exit The "mysql" part is replaced by spaces on secondary prompts, so visually it's more obvious that it's a different state. The space-padding is necessary to keep the user input left-aligned. Maybe PROMPT2 could be improved in that direction in psql. For instance, I wonder if it'd be doable to have PROMPT2 with the line number and proper alignment, so the above session could end up displayed like this: postgres=> select 2+2 2-> help 3-> quit 4-> exit That way, the more lines are typed, the more it becomes obvious that you're in a multi-line statement. Plus numbering lines might be useful in general, anyway. Best regards, -- Daniel Vérité PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org Twitter: @DanielVerite
Re: proposal: alternative psql commands quit and exit
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
