[9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Blue-Maned_Hawk]

Pstree's current placement of the box-drawing characters after an 
inconsistent proportion of digits and spaces means that they don't align 
when using proportional fonts.  This patch rearranges the output of 
pstree to have the box-drawing characters first.

diff 6b6b9a236d773c704daaf7f7b5b090111e28ac87 uncommitted
--- a/sys/src/cmd/pstree.c
+++ b/sys/src/cmd/pstree.c
@@ -149,7 +149,7 @@
  	last = *--r;
  	*r = last == L' ' ? L'└' : L'├';
  	if(p->pid != 0){
-		Bprint(&bout, "%-11d %S", p->pid, buf);
+		Bprint(&bout, "%S%d: ", buf, p->pid);
  		printargs(p->pid);
  		Bprint(&bout, "\n");
  	}
\x1f
diff f70cf0b70eb2b9b6cdf7208bf775189c724eb446 uncommitted
--- a/sys/man/1/ps
+++ b/sys/man/1/ps
@@ -109,10 +109,12 @@
  to print the arguments for the process.  Newlines in arguments will be 
translated to spaces for display.
  .PP
  .I Pstree
-prints the processes as a tree in a two-column layout where
-the first column being the process id and second column
-the program name and arguments indented and prefixed with
-line drawing runes to reflect the nesting in the hierarchy.
+prints the processes as a tree in a layout where each line
+coresponds to a process and consists of line-drawing
+characters reflecting the nesting of the process in terms of
+the surrounding lines followed by the process ID followed by
+a colon and a space followed by the program name and
+arguments.
  .SH FILES
  .B /proc/*/status
  .SH SOURCE

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Jacob Moody]

On 11/22/23 17:11, Blue-Maned_Hawk wrote:
> Pstree's current placement of the box-drawing characters after an 
> inconsistent proportion of digits and spaces means that they don't align 
> when using proportional fonts.  This patch rearranges the output of 
> pstree to have the box-drawing characters first.

The width specifier there makes all pids take up 11 characters minimum
so the characters until the "box characters" is consistent.
I am not exactly sure what the bug here is or why this patch fixes it.

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[umbraticus]

> I am not exactly sure what the bug here is or why this patch fixes it.

hand-wringing over pixels like this, I guess:

http://www.9paste.net/none/proptree.png

get a life.

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Jacob Moody]

On 11/22/23 22:39, umbraticus@prosimetrum.com wrote:
>> I am not exactly sure what the bug here is or why this patch fixes it.
> 
> hand-wringing over pixels like this, I guess:
> 
> http://www.9paste.net/none/proptree.png

I see, now that makes sense.

> 
> get a life.

Is this directed at me?

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[umbraticus]

> Is this directed at me?

no, people worried about such things

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[ori]

Quoth umbraticus@prosimetrum.com:
> > Is this directed at me?
> 
> no, people worried about such things

meh, it'd annoy me too. I'd suggest using a
tab here, though, as god intended.

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Kurt H Maier]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 12:30:00AM -0500, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> Quoth umbraticus@prosimetrum.com:
> > > Is this directed at me?
> > 
> > no, people worried about such things
> 
> meh, it'd annoy me too. I'd suggest using a
> tab here, though, as god intended.
> 

pic(1)

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[umbraticus]

> I'd suggest using a tab here, though, as god intended.

http://www.9paste.net/none/tabtab.png

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Blue-Maned_Hawk]

On 11/23/23 00:59, umbraticus@prosimetrum.com wrote:
>> I'd suggest using a tab here, though, as god intended.
> 
> http://www.9paste.net/none/tabtab.png

As it happens, i'd in fact tried using tabs for this patch instead 
before settling on its current state.

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Blue-Maned_Hawk]

On 11/22/23 23:39, umbraticus@prosimetrum.com wrote:
> get a life.

Hostility getsn't a person nowhere.

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Jacob Moody]

On 11/24/23 18:29, Blue-Maned_Hawk wrote:
> On 11/23/23 00:59, umbraticus@prosimetrum.com wrote:
>>> I'd suggest using a tab here, though, as god intended.
>>
>> http://www.9paste.net/none/tabtab.png
> 
> As it happens, i'd in fact tried using tabs for this patch instead 
> before settling on its current state.

You'll find this space padded numerical output pattern to be quite common in
Plan 9, pstree is not unique in this. With a majority of fonts we ship with the system,
this works fine. If we label this instance "wrong" do we also intend to fix it elsewhere?
Changing this output also has the consequence of breaking people's existing scripts, and while
pstree is not exactly used for scripting there are other instances of this space padded numeric
output that very much are.

I would prefer to not go ripping up the floorboards because the output does not look perfect on
some custom fonts. If you would like to have a "perfect" display that knows how wide your font is
and takes that in to account I suggest to try your hand at writing a graphical program. Perhaps you
can make your own 9front task manager with collapsible process tree.

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[umbraticus]

> Hostility getsn't a person nowhere.

Whither've double negatives & other obstinately idiomatic speech patterns gotten thee?

But sure, I'll rephrase. I am an avid user of proportional fonts and
things like this can annoy me a little but never to the point that
I have bothered to fix them, so thanks for the patch, I guess.

I think I once hacked up a font-changing mechanism for rio & it
wasn't too hard, but again, never bothered keeping it. iirc there
is some scaffolding in libframe and/or rio to indicate that this may
have been an intended feature.

khm's mentioning pic somehow made me try pstree | page which
will do in a pinch to see monospaced output all lined up, so thanks
for instigating that discovery, too.

umbraticus

Re: [9front] [PATCH] Make pstree work with proportional fonts

[Blue-Maned_Hawk]

On 11/24/23 20:33, Jacob Moody wrote:
> Changing this output also has the consequence of breaking people's existing scripts, and while
> pstree is not exactly used for scripting there are other instances of this space padded numeric
> output that very much are.

Ah, i see.  In that case, i hereby completely rescind this patch.