On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 5:40 AM, Colin 't Hart wrote:
> Here's a new version of a small patch to psql I'm using locally.
>
> It adds a command \ns to psql which is a shortcut to set the
> SEARCH_PATH variable.
>
> I've also added tab completion making this command much more useful. I
> don't think tab completition would be possible if this command was
> defined as a variable (which was another suggestion offered at the
> time).
It's possible that the tab completion argument is a sufficient reason
for including this, but I'm kinda skeptical. The amount of typing
saved is pretty minimal, considering that set sea completes to
set search_path. Assuming we had proper tab completion for set
search_path = (and off-hand, it doesn't look like that does anything
useful), this would be saving 5 keystrokes every time you want to
change the search path (set sea is eight keystrokes, where
\ns is four... but it also saves you the semicolon at the end).
I'm sure some people would find that worthwhile, but personally, I
don't. Short commands are cryptic, and IMHO psql is already an
impenetrable thicket of difficult-to-remember abbreviations. I've
been using it for more than 10 years now and I still have to to run \?
on a semi-regular basis. I think that if we start adding things like
this, that help message is going to rapidly fill up with a whole lot
more abbreviations for things that are quite a bit incrementally less
useful than what's there right now.
After all, if we're going to have \ns to set the search path, why not
have something similar for work_mem, or random_page_cost? I set both
of those variables more often than I set search_path; and there could
easily be someone else out there whose favorite GUC is client_encoding
or whatever. And, for that matter, why stop with GUCs? \ct for
CREATE TABLE would save lots of typing, too
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
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