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

[zimoun]

Dear

On Mon, 27 Apr 2020 at 10:39, Jan Synacek <address@hidden> wrote:

> Yes, it is truncated in the sense of it doesn't show all the output, unless 
> you use a pipe, redirect or set the env variable. If I run 'guix package -A', 
> it outputs all the available packages without truncating anything and without 
> giving me "helpful" hints. And that's currently 13201 lines on my system. 
> That's how I expect commands to behave and that has been pretty much the 
> normal thing to do since forever.

There is a difference: "guix search" computes a relevance score
depending on the query and the result is sorted by relevance.
Therefore, the few first items should be the most relevant with the
query and page the result should not be "useful" (yes it is debatable!
:-))

There is room of improvement!
For example, 'aptitutde search <query>' returns (by default): name TAB
synopsis. I find that really handy. Even if it would not be the
default, it should be possible to display differently the result of
"guix search".
Another example, it should be possible to sort the result by another
key than the relevance, e.g., to group them by file origin or license
or your-name-it.

Patches welcome. :-)



> While we're at it, let me also give my opinion about supporting PAGER. If it 
> means that if PAGER is set, use it, otherwise don't page, then that's 
> perfectly valid and, in my opinion, how PAGER support is supposed to work. If 
> it means that *unless* something is set *not to use* a pager as some tools 
> currently do (I can only think of some of the systemd tools off top of my 
> head), use pager by default, then that's also backwards. But it's still much 
> better than truncating output by default.

Does Git work the way you suggest all the tools are working?


All the best,
simon