Re: FWD: Re: Updated backslash consistency patch

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 12:36 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Brendan Jurd" <direvus@gmail.com> writes:
> > Most people wanting to learn about which system functions are
> > available will be surely be going to the manual, not using \df?
> 
> I think people use \df all the time to check the argument list, verify
> whether they remember the function name correctly, etc.  It's not for
> "learning about" stuff you never heard of, it's for remembering details
> (as indeed is the usage for user-defined functions too).


Perhaps the way to solve this problem is to change the way the output is
rendered. E.g;

\df output wraps at 1024x768 which greatly limits usability as a whole.
I hadn't noticed this until today as my workstation video card exploded
and I have a temporary one that can't do more than 1024x768 with linux.
Dropping the return type from the default output would solve this
problem I think (use + to get the return type). 

More importantly why not just have it so \df sorts like this:

1. session users functions first
2. public functions second 
3. pg_catalog functions last

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake


> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
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