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Comment by pawelduda | Hacker News Reader

My favourite tips:

  \e to open new/last query in $EDITOR of your choice
  \x to toggle extended display on/off (useful when a table has loads of columns and your screen runs out of width)

If you feel like stepping out of psql, pgcli is a great drop-in replacement with autocompletion/syntax highlighting and more.

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\x is great but I'm even more fond of \gx, which transposes the last query you ran but leaves the setting as it was before. So it's very handy if you don't plan ahead.

You can also use \gx in place of the semicolon, so you don't even need to run the query in the "wrong" mode first. Just say `SELECT * FROM wide_table \gx`.

Appreciate the tip. \x is pretty much my default mode and I always forget to set it on the first query.

You can add it to ~/.psqlrc to always enable it. Use "psql -X" to skip loading that file (useful for scripts).

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