Hi all, The good news is that psql's backslash commands are becoming quite thorough at displaying all information which could conceivably be of interest about an object. The bad news is, psql's backslash commands often produce a lot of noise and wasted output. (There was some grumbling along these lines re: the recent Stats Target patch).
I'd like to propose a "concise mode" for psql, which users might turn on via a \pset option. Concise mode would affect only the output of psql's backslash commands. For output results which have some all-NULL columns, as in: test=# \d+ foo Table "public.foo" Column | Type | Modifiers | Storage | Stats target | Description --------+---------+-----------+---------+--------------+------------- a | integer | | plain | | b | integer | | plain | | Has OIDs: no Concise mode would simply omit the all-NULL columns, so that the output would look like this: test=# \d+ foo Table "public.foo" Column | Type | Storage --------+---------+--------- a | integer | plain b | integer | plain Has OIDs: no For actually implementing this: it'd be nice if the changes could be localized to printQuery(). Unfortunately, there are a few stragglers such as describeOneTableDetails() which have their own notions about how to print their output, so I'm not sure how straightforward/small such a patch would be. But I just wanted to throw the idea out there. Any thoughts? Josh -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers