Ellisons don't play nice with column alignment

[BAXTER001]

For example all rows with the [...] substituted in have slightly incorrect offsets for the following columns, for example the "Digital Marketing Executive - Ar..." entry below.

dogecoin-logo.png                                                                             Binary File
Digital Marketing Executive - Ar[...]                                   Binary File
final.gif                                                                                     Binary File

Output is from a 55x186 gnome terminal session.

[sg-s]

yeah, i see this too.

[dborzov]

This is a major issue that really affects user experience. I will need to address it first, thanks for bringing it up.

[BAXTER001]

If you can point me to the section to stare at I'd be happy to give a fix a go.

[dborzov]

Wow, that would have been amazing, thanks @BAXTER001 ! The func in question is in fmt.go@PrintColumns(filename, description string).

There is this complication that I use colorstring library that converts colour tags within the string into escape characters to show coloured text in shell:

   fmt.Println(colorstring.Color("[blue]Hello [red]World!"))

These colour tags skew off the string lengths. Not sure how to bypass that easily at this stage. Maybe use other shell coloring library with a different syntax?

Maybe add a new ShellString type:

        type struct ShellString {
            s string
            color string
        }

        func (s ShellString) String() string {
            return colorstring.Color("["+s.color+"]"+  s.s) 
       }

        func (s ShellString) Length() string {
            return strings.RuneCountInString(s.s) 
       }

I think that would be the most idiomatic go way (see e.g. NullString in database/sql package) but that is quite a lot of refactoring.

[dborzov]

While we are at it, we can also make it support general number of columns, not just two. Something like PrintColumns(columns []string) instead of PrintColumns(filename, description string).

Should have done this right at the time. But nooo 😜