Andreas Karlsson <andreas@proxel.se> writes: > 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.
The second of these seems pretty bletcherous --- for one thing, it might fall foul of localization attempts. However, I could see the argument for not using expanded mode for any single-column output.
+1 to option #1, I sympathize to this as an annoyance that can be easily fixed.
