Re: \x auto and EXPLAIN

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 4:36 AM, Andreas Karlsson <andreas@proxel.se> wrote:
> psql's "\x auto" is a nice feature, but it is made much less useful in my
> opinion due to the expanded output format making query plans unreadable (and
> query plans often end up using expanded display due to their width). I think
> we should never use the expanded format for EXPLAIN output in the "\x auto"
> mode, since even when the wrapped format is used the query plans are very
> hard to read.
>
> I see two ways to fix this.
>
> 1) Never use expanded display for the case where there is only one column.
> There seems to me like there is little value in using expanded display for
> when you only have one column, but I may be missing some use case here.
>
> 2) Explicitly detect (for example based on the headers) that the result is a
> query plan and if so disable expanded display.
>
> I have attached a trivial patch for each solution.

Committed #1 after updating the comments and adding documentation.

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Robert Haas
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