HeidiSQL Available Also for Linux
heidisql.com
heidisql.com
Since some days it is finally available in a native Linux version. The code has been ported from Delphi to FreePascal / Lazarus.
It's great news that this is now available for Linux, but the better news for me is that I can now build it on Lazarus / FreePascal. Even if it doesn't support all the features (eg MSSQL), at least I can now contribute fixes for some UI issues that have been bothering me.
I can successfully build the FreePascal version on Windows and it runs... fine. Feels a little less snappy than the Delphi version and there are some UI padding issues. But it's a massive step in the right direction.
If you can, please support this project, either financially or through code. contributions. IHMO what is dearly needed is for the different SQL dialects to be abstracted out properly. It's currently done in a bit of a crude way (no disrespect to the author) and it will require a big refactoring to get it right, but will open doors to more dialects.
Depending on how OS-independent it is, it might just be a matter of opening the project file and selecting Run -> Build (yes, the fact that Build is under Run is something that always bothered me, but it has been like that for 22+ years now). However the resulting app will be very "win-like" and when i was making macOS builds using Lazarus back when i cared about macOS i always had a "Macize" function i called at startup (ifdef'd for mac builds) that did things like replace the Ctrl modifier shortcuts with Command in menus (you can enumerate the menus, no need to do that by hand), move the About command to the apple menu, etc. There are also some other things that you may feel like doing.
TBH one thing that i wish was possible with Lazarus (at the time, now i don't care much :-P) was to be able to define different "layouts" per widgetset in a way that allowed you to use, say, a 'default' layout for Windows and Linux but a modified layout for macOS. Technically it is possible to design a form and then have another form inherit from it and apply modifications there, but it feels kinda awkward to use for different layouts (it is mainly meant for creating forms that you want to reuse but still have modifications - and it can be clunky in how it decides when to ignore changes in the base form or not - i do not use visual form inheritance, but i do use frames to design reusable controls visually and i often have to edit the source code of form files that use frames to remove overrides after saving the form so that changes to the frame are reflected in all forms that use it - this makes me want to add a readonly property to frames at some point :-P).
I was trying out DBeaver a lot, actually, but a couple of things here and there didn't work as expected. Sometimes I had problems with batch selections that I couldn't reproduce so I was then most of the time switching back to HeidiSQL in my wine sandbox when it didn't work, out of frustration.
To me it's really great to see Heidi getting revived into a community software again, I really missed the tool a lot since I've made the switch to Linux as my daily driver everywhere. Wine's double click seemless windows aren't really nice and sometimes really annoying.
DBeaver has the worst name in history but it can do everything Heidi does and doesn’t fall over every 20 minutes. The buttons are all over the place and it’s harder to navigate than Heidi but it’s also standard on a few distros.
I’m glad it has some competition though. If you’re working with sql server Microsoft have really dropped the ball with SSMS and don’t talk to me about azure data studio it is a undergraduate project that got a C.
I was switching a lot between SQLite, pawl, Marian and sql server and dbeaver is excellent on all of them
Meanwhile Heidi is fine.
Hey man. You take that back.
Works great in Wine before this native version came about.
It required certain host/user/cid combination to pass the whitelist.
Free versions are generous enough for daily use as well. For example for TablePlus "The free trial is limited to 2 opened tabs, 2 opened windows, 2 advanced filters (filters are not available on the free TablePlus Windows) at a time."
Very emblematic of it's Java GUI roots.
And some tools dont...
last year i looked at it again, in a project where mongodb is used, it did not perform so well, sure the features where there, but still mongodb is document orientated so i had to come up with workarounds and so ... yeah back to cli unfortunately
but for any relational database, I'd rather use datagrip!
Because when I switched to MacOS I had to find a replacement for HeidiSQL and, to my surprise, I was able to do everything I wanted to directly from IntelliJ, which was already my main IDE.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/database-tool-window.htm...
How does this compare with DbGate (https://github.com/dbgate/dbgate)?
Does it still lock up the entire UI if a query takes longer than five seconds to return results? Does it still pop up exception dialogs every ten minutes when it’s been open for longer than a few hours?
But nobody's going to do this without being a huge vim nerd, so I recognize it's not a general alternative.
I prefer Heidi where the DB setup allows it, and use DBeaver as a backup.
Unfortunately it's not that good on postgres or ms sql server. Feels more buggy and slow for these databases but I'm not sure if it's Heidi or the db drivers.
I'm also one of the people that used heidi on Linux with wine (along with notepad++) so a native version is more than welcome!
The deb package here didn't run for me on Debian 12 nor under distrobox Ubuntu, i think the dependency list needs a little attention, but that can be easily solved.
No other Linux program has anywhere near half the features of HeidiSQL. Saying this is great news is an understatement.
I've missed Heidi after changing job and moving from MySQL to Mongo and then Linux many (many) years ago. Looking forward to see how it goes with Postgres and SQLite nowadays.