Re: [PATCH 3/2] pretty: support right alignment

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 20, 2012, 16:40 UTC
Message-ID: <7v392cd4vi.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120920143803.GA9527@lanh>

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> And this is a for-fun patch that adds %| to right align everything
> after that. I'm ignoring problems with line wrapping, i18n and so
> on. "%C+%h %s%|%d" looks quite nice. I'm not sure how much useful it
> is beyond --oneline though. It looks something like this
> ...
> [oneline output ellided]
> ...

I think this is a great feature at the conceptual level, and you know "but" is coming ;-).

 - Shouldn't it be "everything from there until the end of the
   current line" than "everything after that"?

 - How is the display width determined and is it fixed once it gets
   computed?

 - How does this interact with the wrapped output?  Should it?

 - I am wondering if somebody ever want to do this with a follow-up
   patch:

	Left %h%|Center %cd%|Right %ad

   Is %| a sensible choice for "flush right"?  I am wondering if it
   makes more sense to make %|, %< and %> as "multi-column
   introducer" (the example defines output with three columns) that
   also tells how text inside each column is flushed inside the
   column, e.g.

	%>col 1 right flushed%|col 2 centered%< col 3 left flushed

   or something like that (we may want explicit "column width"
   specifiers if we were to do this kind of thing).