When I first set out to create pgcli, my goal was to
design a Postgresql client that shipped with sensible defaults. It shouldn't
require fiddling with config files to enable features.
How did we do on that goal? This is one of those subjective goals that is not
so easy to measure. But fortunately, Craig
posted a useful
blogpost
that shows how to configure your psql shell to make it powerful.
I figured I'll use that as a scoring card to see how many of those features
are shipped by default in pgcli.
Prompt
One of the things covered in the blogpost is customizing the prompt to show the
server name and the database name.
Pgcli ships with a default prompt that has user@host:dbname>. When you're
writing a multi-line query the subsequent lines will be indented and filled
with ......
Both of these can be overridden via the config file (~/.config/pgcli/config)
but you hardly ever have to change the defaults.
Null values
By default psql won't show the NULL values in a table. You could force psql
to show a placeholder value via pset null. In pgcli the null values are
always shown and they are show as <null>.
Once again this can be overridden to any character of your preference via the
config file.
Timing
You can time your sql queries by enabling \timing in psql. This is enabled by
default in pgcli. Every query is timed and the results are displayed at the
bottom of the output.
History
History in pgcli is unlimited. But pgcli has no option to separate the history
for different databases.
The feature described in the blogpost talks about a cool feature to store the
history of a session scoped to a database. This is an awesome feature that we
might adopt in pgcli in the future versions.
Output Formatting
Expanded mode in psql is a way to output the results of a query if the output
is too wide to fit in the screen when shown as a table. This can be toggled by
\x on or \x off.
The \x auto command in psql will intelligently choose between the table
format or the expanded format based on the screen width.
In pgcli, we have the ability to do this but this is not enabled by default. It
has to be enabled via the config file (~/.config/pgcli/config) by the user.
I don't think we'll change this behavior.
Keyword Casing
One of the psql options is to choose either the upper case or lower case for
keyword completion. So when you type sel and then hit tab, psql will
auto-complete SELECT if upper-case was chosen as the option.
In pgcli we have those explicit 'upper' and 'lower' options. In addition we
have an 'auto' option which is set as default. This will choose the casing
based on what the user has typed so far. So if you type sel and hit tab,
pgcli will suggest select, whereas if you type SEL and hit tab it will
suggest SELECT. I'm sure there is a way achieve this in psql, but this is the
option that pgcli ships with.
Conclusion
We have plenty of other config options that ship with default values. You can
see a list of all the config values in ~/.config/pgcli/config if you have
pgcli installed or you can checkout the
pgclirc file for a
quick view. Let us know how we did.