Pager for data

Any Unix like systems has great feature - a pager. The history of pagers is pretty old. Originally was used manually. The result of some programs can be redirected to any program with pipe operator.

ls -la | more

One, most simple pager is more. It can scroll only in one direction. Usually this is default pager in Unix systems.

Much more powerful pager is less. Has lot of advantages and functionality - mainly possibility to scroll in two direction, strong navigation inside result. It can display long lines, and allow horizontal scrolling. This pager is necessary for comfortable usage of psql console (note: it is works with mysql, mariadb or vertica console).

export PAGER="less -S"
psql postgres
postgres=>select * from pg_class;

It is good to know some less commands:

• g - move to document begin,
  
• G - move to document end,
  
• / - search string,
  
• n - next occurrence of string,
  
• N - previous occurrence of string,
  
• q - quit.
  

less is very rich pager has special support for displaying man pages. But this feature we cannot to use for database data. For tabular data, there are special pager pspg (mysql, pgcli are supported too). This pager can freeze n first columns, and m first rows. It knows almost all keyboard commands of less pager, and append some new (based on mcedit keywords).

• Alt k - new bookmark
  
• Alt i - previous bookmark
  
• Alt j - next bookmark
  
• Alt n - show row numbers
  
• Alt l - go to line
  
• Ctrl Home - move to document begin
  
• Ctrl End - move to document end
  
• F9 - menu
  
• F10 - quit
  

The usage of pspg is same:

export PAGER=pspg
psql postgres
...

This pager is available from PostgreSQL community repository or from git https://github.com/okbob/pspg.