Comment by samaysharma 3 days ago
What would you say are the key benefits of using this over psql? Is it mainly table metadata and properties?
Asking because running queries, history, formatting of results etc. can be achieved by configuring psqlrc.
oh wow, if i had known about pspg beforehand i might not have made this, it looks great!
It’s a good idea! For some reason Postico’s built-in query viewer doesn’t seem to follow them, unfortunately.
a big one for me is being able to jump between/search for tables and preview their rows, columns, and indexes quickly; especially when there are many tables/schemas and i don't remember their names
another one is a more comfortable editing experience for queries
I didn’t learn this until recently but in psql you can use \e or \editor to open the current line in $EDITOR. It helps a lot.
Not OP, but I personally put off using a UI for years before finally trying a few and eventually settling on Postico for Mac. I still jump to psql often, but for me it's an accumulation of small quality-of-life improvements:
- results are formatted nicely by default; no more doing a first query, getting too many columns so results wrap unreadably, then changing the columns for a second query, and so on
- manually editing rows is as easy as with a spreadsheet; of course hopefully you don't have to do this often...
- I can change common filters & sorts in the UI with a few clicks instead of having to change SQL; sure, the SQL would only require typing a few characters, but if it's 2 clicks vs. 8 characters, it's still a small win
Downsides are:
- the GUI has an interface for saving queries, but it refuses to let me save them to a subfolder of my project; it wants to save them all in some global location. This doesn't seem good for sharing queries
- if you are doing more complicated sorting or aggregation, it's still easier to just go to psql than to fiddle with the GUI