I wonder about people’s development workflows. If you are using a tool like this, how much time are you spending in the command-line (where all such tools can be interfaced)? Are most tools used wrapped in some layer like this?
I spend most of my time in the command line:
- neovim for file editing,
- zsh (+zoxide) for navigation / file management,
- plain git to manage my repos,
- plain text note taking and accounting, etc.
There’s a lot of developers that are scared of the command-line. Truth is you don’t really need these IDEs if you truly know SQL and your database, writing queries isn’t difficult. Keeping a file with common queries isn’t hard either. But most developers just keep a very shallow pool of knowledge and lean into ORMs etc.
I'm using CLIs like A LOT, but still would be happy to get _good_ autocomplete for SQL.
`psql` is pretty bad at it and in `\e` you will just end up in an editor, which will probably don't know about your schema.
I've tried many tools, but seems like I like DataGrip (or databases in PyCharm Professional) the most, so I use EAP from time to time, when I'm going to write a lot of SQL.
Hm, is there a psql extension to augment the CLI and provide better autocomplete, maybe even interface with LLM? And then it just stores whatever metadata (like queries you want to save) in its own tables...
I am very comfortable in the command line and still work with databases in IDEA. It gives you:
— autocompletion for everything — table/function names, types; very helpful on projects with hundreds to thousands of tables
— navigation ("jump to referenced table", "find foreign keys to this column", etc)
— data export in two dozen formats (configurable)
— exactly the same UI for working with 30 database engines (or however many it supports, I'm too lazy to count). Especially helpful with databases that have atrocious CLI clients, like Oracle.
— a nice tree-structured view of your database; or you can generate a (possibly vector) diagram for the rare case when that helps
— high quality autoformatter that works for every SQL dialect it supports, and in the same way
— minor things like the ability to extract a subquery with a couple of key presses, or rename a table alias
Probably something else I'm forgetting.
Saving a couple of keystrokes when writing SQL has little to do with it.