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Comment by kawera | Hacker News Reader

Pgcli is an alternative command line tool with auto-completion and syntax highlighting. Open source and works well: http://pgcli.com/

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Sure, you can use pgcli instead of psql. But it doesn't replace psql. In fact, most tasks described in the article cannot be accomplished with pgcli.

- it can't list schemas with \dn

- it can't list materialized views with \dm

- \dt <star>.users doesn't work as it does in psql, i.e. it just lists all tables due to the * instead of listing users tables in all schemas

- it can't use your editor with \e

- it can't input existing files with \i

- it can't redirect the output with \o

- it can't extract data with \copy

True, it's not a replacement for psql but a great little tool for examining databases and playing with queries.

Note that the project is quite new and has a really active dev base - if you use those features, feel free to submit a PR (or add an issue) and it's pretty sure to get accepted.

Has someone raised these yet? Otherwise I will.

Out of curiosity, I just tried out v0.19.2 (the latest), and some of these now work:

- \dn works

- \dm does not

- \dt <star>.users now appears to work as per psql

- \e works

- \i works

- \o does not

- \copy does not

Funny, I just tested those yesterday. And they none of them seemed to work. And I think I had installed the newest version for the test. Anyways, I stand corrected. It's great to see some of these working now as the tab-completion is definitely better than psql's.

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