Re: [PATCH/WIP 0/9] for-each-ref format improvements

Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:

The purpose of this series is to make "for-each-ref --format" powerful
enough to display what "branch -v" and "branch -vv" do so that we
could get rid of those display code and use for-each-ref code instead.

Damn, you beat me to it.  I just introduced color, and was working on
alignment.  See $gmane/224692.

Yes, I think this is the direction we should be taking.  Poorly
thought-out stuff like -v and -vv should be deprecated.

This series introduces:

 - %(current), which either shows "*" if the ref is pointed by HEAD
   or a space. Junio called it %(headness). I don't like that.
   I don't like %(current) either but we have to start somewhere.
   Name suggestion? %(marker)??

How about %(HEAD)?

 - %(tracking[:upstream]) gives us the exact output that branch -v[v]
   does. %(upstream) does not include []. We can't change its
   semantics.

There's already an atom called "upstream", and "upstream:short" works.
 Why not introduce "upstream:diff" for "[ahead x, behind y]" and
"upstream:shortdiff" for "<>" (like in the prompt)?

 - %(color:...) is pretty much the same as %C family in pretty code.
   I haven't added code for %(color:foo) == %C(foo) yet. There's a
   potential ambiguity here: %C(red) == %Cred or %C(red)??

I'd vote for dropping %C<name> altogether and just go with %C(<name>).
 Why do we need %(color:<name>) at all?

 - %(...:aligned) to do left aligning. I'm not entirely sure about
   this. We might be able to share code with %>, %< and %>< from
   pretty.c. But we need improvements there too because in
   for-each-ref case, we could calculate column width but %< would
   require the user to specify the width.

Yeah, I think we should go with the %> and %< you introduced in
pretty.c.  Yes, I want to be able to specify width.

   Do people expect fancy layout with for-each-ref (and branch)? If so
   we might need to have %(align) or something instead of the simple
   left alignment case in %(...:aligned)

Why should we deviate from the pretty case?  What is different here?

 - We may need an equivalent of the space following % in pretty
   format. If the specifier produces something, then prepend a space,
   otherwise produce nothing. Do it like %C( tracking) vs
   %C(tracking)??

Yeah, sounds good.

You can try this after applying the series, which should give you the
about close to 'branch -v'. %(tracking) coloring does not work though.

Why doesn't %(tracking) coloring work?

Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy (9):

I'll have a look at this.

Also, I think it'll help to have a --pretty="format:<string>"
equivalent to --format="<string>" so that we can introduce pretty
names like oneline, short, medium, full.  We can eventually deprecate
--format for consistency.