Re: Fwd: Another little thing about psql wrapped expanded output

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 12:37 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
>>> If you're fixing the dashed-line code, is there a way to say that we
>>> never have more than a reasonable number of dashes (ideally, the width
>>> of the terminal) no matter how wide the data is?  Having 4000 dashes
>>> because of large text on one row is kinda painful, and not at all useful.
>
>> If you use the default format (\pset format aligned) in expanded mode, then
>> I agree with you we shouldn't print a half screen full of dashes to
>> separate every tuple.
>
> Don't think I agree.  Suppose that you have a wider-than-screen table
> and you use a pager to scroll left and right in that.  If we shorten the
> dashed lines, then once you scroll to the right of wherever they stop,
> you lose that visual cue separating the rows.  This matters a lot if
> only a few of the column values are very wide: everywhere else, there's
> gonna be lots of whitespace.

For what it's worth, I'm with Josh and Jeff.  My pager, like nearly
everybody else's, is less.  And it's not stupid to have a behavior
that works reasonably with less's default settings.  I haven't kept a
count of the number of times I've had to scroll down through endless
pages of dashes in order to find some data that's not dashes, but it's
surely quite a few.

Your point is also valid, so I don't mean to detract from that.  But
the status quo is definitely annoying.

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