Hi Brad, While I prefer the indentation style that Postgres following for better readability of text, if we are changing it, this may break existing scripts of users/operators if tightly coupled with the current format/spaces etc (Ideally shouldn’t be, but as Cassandra being used all over the world, such scenarios are possible). To avoid breaking such existing scripts, I believe either these changes need to happen in a major release or under a feature flag (which can be deprecated over the time), for existing scripts to continue without breaking until they are fixed.
Thanks, Shailaja > On Jan 9, 2024, at 5:23 PM, Derek Chen-Becker <de...@chen-becker.org> wrote: > > Actually, now that I'm looking at the original email on my browser and not my > phone (and can see the formatting properly), I think we have the nomenclature > backward here. Left-alignment in the printing world means that text in each > cell starts at the left-most column for the cell, but in your examples you're > calling that right-aligned (and vice-versa). Along the lines of what Stefan > said, I think this probably came about more as a "we'll just keep things > simple and use the same alignment everywhere" rather than an intentional > right-alignment of text for a specific purpose. I would actually be fine with > left-aligning text to fit what appears to be standard practice in other > systems. > > Cheers, > > Derek > > On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 7:34 AM Brad <bscho...@gmail.com > <mailto:bscho...@gmail.com>> wrote: >> CQLSH currently left-aligns all output, affecting both numbers and text. >> While this works well for numbers, a better approach adopted by many is to >> left align numbers and right align text. >> >> For example, both Excel and Postgres shell use the later: >> >> psql >> # select * from employee; >> empid | name | dept >> -------+---------+------------ >> 1 | Clark | Sales >> 200 | Dave | Accounting >> 33 | Johnson | Sales >> >> while CQLSH simply left aligns all the columns >> >> cqlsh> select * from employee; >> empid | dept | name >> -------+------------+--------- >> 33 | Sales | Johnson >> 1 | Sales | Clark >> 200 | Accounting | Dave >> >> >> Left aligned text looks much worse on text values which share common prefixes >> >> cqlsh> select * from system_views.system_properties limit 7 ; >> >> name | value >> --------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------- >> JAVA_HOME | >> /Users/brad/.jenv/versions/17 >> cassandra.jmx.local.port | >> 7199 >> cassandra.logdir | >> /usr/local/cassandra-5.0-beta1/bin/../logs >> cassandra.storagedir | >> /usr/local/cassandra-5.0-beta1/bin/../data >> com.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate | >> false >> com.sun.management.jmxremote.password.file | >> /etc/cassandra/jmxremote.password >> io.netty.transport.estimateSizeOnSubmit | >> false >> >> >> The Jira CASSANDRA-19150 >> <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-19150> discusses this in >> further detail with some additional examples. >> >> I wanted to raise the issue here to propose changing CQLSH to right-align >> text while continue to left-align numbers. >> >> Regards, >> >> Brad Schoening >> >> >> Reply >> Forward >> >> Add reaction > > > -- > +---------------------------------------------------------------+ > | Derek Chen-Becker | > | GPG Key available at https://keybase.io/dchenbecker and | > | https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=derek%40chen-becker.org | > | Fngrprnt: EB8A 6480 F0A3 C8EB C1E7 7F42 AFC5 AFEE 96E4 6ACC | > +---------------------------------------------------------------+ >
