Re: psql tab completion for SELECT

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> That seems pretty nearly entirely bogus.  What is the argument for
>>> supposing that the word right after SELECT is a function name?
>
>> It isn't necessarily, but it might be.  It'd certainly be nice to type:
>> SELECT pg_si<TAB>
>> and get:
>> SELECT pg_size_pretty(
>
> Yeah, and then you'll type
>
>        SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_dat<TAB>
>
> and get nothing, and curse the authors of such a misbegotten incomplete
> concept that leads your fingers to rely on something that doesn't work
> where it should.
>
> I'm not against tab-completing functions, if people think that's
> useful.  I am against tab-completing them in 1% of use-cases, which is
> what this patch accomplishes.  The fact that it's short doesn't make it
> good.

Our tab completion is in general very incomplete; we have made a
practice of cherry-picking the most commonly encountered cases and
handling only those.  Whether or not that is a good policy is a
philosophical question, but there is no reason to hold this particular
patch to a higher standard than the quality of our tab completion code
in general.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company