Not so happy with psql's new multiline behavior

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: pgsql-hackers(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: Not so happy with psql's new multiline behavior
Date: 2006-03-04 17:08:25
Message-ID: 21637.1141492105@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Has anyone else been finding the recent behavior of CVS-tip psql
to be a disimprovement? I've gotten sufficiently annoyed with it
that I'm ready to propose reverting this patch:

2006-02-11 16:55 momjian

* src/bin/psql/: help.c, input.c, input.h, mainloop.c, prompt.c,
tab-complete.c: o Improve psql's handling of multi-line statements

Currently, while \e saves a single statement as one entry,
interactive
statements are saved one line at a time. Ideally all
statements
would be saved like \e does.

Sergey E. Koposov

Maybe it's just that I'm too used to the old behavior, but I don't like
anything about the way it works now. As an example, the new behavior is
extremely unfriendly to backslash commands. I just got done typing a
long command and then deciding that I would like to have \timing on, so
I hit return (which in prior versions would have entered the line into
the history buffer), typed \timing, hit return again, hit control-P, and
found that I'd lost my long command. In other situations I find that
control-P pulls back weird combinations of SQL and backslash commands,
and there's no way AFAICT to separate the two.

At a minimum this code has to be fixed to understand the difference
between backslash commands and SQL lines, and not combine them in
history entries; otherwise we should revert it. I'm leaning to "revert"
since I haven't actually seen a case where pulling back multiple lines
helped me ... but maybe that just reflects that I don't retype multiline
SQL commands all that much.

Comments?

regards, tom lane

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