Re: [help-recutils] Suggestions on recutils CLI

[Paul Rankin]

Hi Jose,

Thanks for your quick response.

> Sounds like a good idea, to make the utilities to react to the presence
> of a file called 'Recfiles' in the current directory, and also a global
> configuration file.
> 
> However, what would you put in the Recfiles file?
> 
> What I originally envisioned was to use directories to organize
> recfiles.  The utilities could easily find the right file to open using
> the type of the record referred in the command.  For example:
> 
> $ echo $RECDIRS
> .:/my/database/:others/
> $ recsel -t Contact -p Name
> 
> The command above would search for a file named Contact.rec in any of
> the directories in $RECDIRS...

Would the $RECDIRS approach return records from multiple recfiles sharing the 
same type name, e.g. if two recfiles found in $RECDIRS had the `%rec: contact` 
name would `$ recsel -t contact` return all records of the contact type from 
both recfiles? I think this would be very useful.

But I think you could also cater to the user who works the other way too, so if 
a user keeps multiple recfiles in a single directory, and each recfile shares 
the same type structure (e.g. contact, company, log)... 90% of the time the 
user may want to return results only from a main recfile, but sometimes wishes 
to override this with other recfiles...

$ echo $RECFILE
/Users/Mary/Documents/main.rec

$ recsel -t contact
=> results from main.rec

$ recsel -t contact -f ~/Documents/secondary.rec
=> results from secondary.rec


>   * Globally set --case-insensitive option
> 
>   I feel like case sensitively is the exception rather than the rule,
>   hence the alias above sets the -i option whenever I call
>   recsel. Another reason for a ~/.rec file?
> 
> Yes, definitely.  That should be configurable in a global configuration
> file.  I would call the file ~/.recutilsrc tho.  "rec" is too general.

Sounds great!


>   * Long results could be piped through less
> 
>   Just a matter of convenience. I'm usually piping queries through less
>   anyway, but it's usually a case of query then "oh bother" then query |
>   less.
> 
> Another thing that could be configurable, a pager...

More greatness.


>   * Tabulated output
> 
>   I managed to achieve tabulated output with the following...
> 
>       $ recsel FILE -t TYPE | rec2csv | column -t -s ',' | tr -d \"
> 
>   One problem with this method is that column does not honour quoted
>   input, meaning that any commas within values are treated as new
>   columns.
> 
>   Again just a matter of convenience, it would be great to tabulated
>   output with just a single -T flag?
> 
> How would that compare to the existing -R?

I was meaning a flag without arguments, whereas the -R flag requires all fields 
passed as arguments... unless I'm missing a way to "select all" like the MySQL 
`*`?

But mainly, the -R flag makes tabulating results messy when values themselves 
contain spaces, e.g.

$ recsel tmp.rec
contact: John Doe
date: 2015-05-08
method: email
notes: Asked about cats and dogs

contact: Peter
date: 2015-05-10
method: phone

$ recsel tmp.rec -R contact,date,method,notes
John Doe 2015-05-08 email Asked about cats and dogs

Peter 2015-05-10 phone

$ recsel tmp.rec -R contact,date,method,notes | column -t
John   Doe         2015-05-08  email  Asked  about  cats  and  dogs
Peter  2015-05-10  phone

Compare with...

$ recsel tmp.rec -p contact,date,method,notes | rec2csv | column -t -s ',' | tr 
-d \"
contact   date        method  notes
John Doe  2015-05-08  email   Asked about cats and dogs
Peter     2015-05-10  phone


>   * RADICAL IDEA WARNING! recutils as a single modular command
> 
>   Similar to the way ledger or git works, you might have...
> 
>       $ rec select ...
>       $ rec format ...
>       $ rec insert ...
> 
>   ...with the command as the smallest unique substring, e.g. select
>   and sel would be equivalent.
> 
> You are not the first suggesting that... but I really never saw the
> point of using a multiplexer command like that.  What would be the
> advantage of doing so?

The main advantage I could see is user help, e.g.

$ rec
Usage: rec [OPTIONS] [COMMAND] [OPTIONS] [FILE]

Commands:
select  Select and print rec data.
set     Alter or delete fields in records.
insert  Insert new records in a rec database.
...

$ rec help select
...

$ rec selrct
Command not recognized. Did you mean `rec select`?

etc.etc.