Re: hint: Run `guix search ... | less' to view all the results

[Robin Templeton <robin@terpri.org>]

Jan Synacek <jsynacek@redhat.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I'm going to give honest feedback, since I still care about some things.
>
> I decided to check the new guix-1.1.0 and one of the first things that I ran was:
>
> $ guix package -s firefox
>
> The resulting message was infuriating to say the least. The code says:
>
> (if (and (not (getenv "INSIDE_EMACS"))
>     ...
>       ...
>       (display-hint (format #f (G_ "Run @code{~a ... | less} \
> to view all the results.")
>                             command)))
>
> Seriously? Are you seriously forcing your users to either run emacs (or at least
> to set the env variable) or use pipes to get the entire search result? 
> That's just... backwards. Also, it feels like as if the author of that code sort
> of assumed that whoever runs the command is stupid enough not to be able to deal
> with long output. I'm sure that it wasn't meant like that.
>
> Pretty please, fix this. Don't force your users into usage patterns that might
> be completely foreign to them. Don't truncate output from programs by default.

Seconded! The current behavior seems exactly backwards compared to most
*nix tools; if I wanted *less* information from "guix search" I'd
manually pipe the output into head or recsel. Perhaps Git-style
auto-pagination (i.e. page the results when outputting to a terminal)
would be a good compromise as a default.