Re: controlling psql's use of the pager a bit more

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 7:52 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:

>
> I often get annoyed because psql is a bit too aggressive when it decides
> whether to put output through the pager, and the only way to avoid this is
> to turn the pager off (in which case your next query might dump many
> thousands of lines to the screen). I'd like a way to be able to specify a
> minumum number of lines of output before psql would invoke the pager,
> rather than just always using the terminal window size.
>

+1.

If it scrolls 2 or 3 lines off the top, I can just use the scroll-back
buffer to look at them, I don't want the pager for that situation.

But I am more interested in width, not length. I don't want it to switch
to the pager just because a couple lines would wrap, especially when
looking at EXPLAIN output. I have played with changing \pset columns, but
then other things get screwy once you set that to a non-actual value. I
don't recall of the top of my head which things those are, though.

Cheers,

Jeff