Suggestion: Automatic pretty printing if stdout is a tty

[nagy]

Hello, interesting project, thank you.

Would it make sense to check whether stdout is connected to a terminal via isatty(3) and then automatically enable pretty printing? I could imagine that, when you are typing on the terminal, you would want to see an easier to read json output, but when you are piping to other programs the size should be small.

You can test how the output behaves when it is not a tty by piping into cat like so:

$ jo a=2 | cat

[gromgit]

I dunno. From my POV, jo is meant to [a] be simple, and [b] generate machine-readable output by default, while making concessions to human readability on the rare occasion it's needed.

It's also mildly annoying to do the following dance:

$ jo <something_that_generates_copious_output>
# ARGH! A thousand lines of pretty-printed text!
$ jo <something_that_generates_copious_output> | less
# ARGH! Everything's squished together!
$ jo -p <something_that_generates_copious_output> | less

So yeah, I'd much rather have jo not guess what kind of output I want.

[jpmens]

I agree with @gromgit. At best we could introduce an environment variable (JO_PRETTY) which, when set to 1 or true or something, would automate pretty-printing, but that's likely also overkill as you can easily do this with a small script.

[Sashank999]

I think we can add -pretty command line option rather than environment variables. It is a long option so it won't be mistaken, instead of something like -p.

[jpmens]

-p already exists; there is no need to make a long option of it.