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.
for those wishing to change the status quo the question is whether there needs to be a way to get back to the present behavior and, more generally, configure the behavior to taste while still having a reasonable default.
Losing a bit of usability in not being able to identify record boundaries while viewing off to the right seems is a trade-off that feels right to me. During interactive use SELECT * is quite useful but is hampered on relations that just happen to have a wide column that you don't care about but also don't want to waste the effort to specify all column names except that one.
