Configure mysql to make it better

Create a file in your ~ directory, named .my.cnf . Drop everything and do this right now.

It should look like this:

[mysql]
prompt = 'mysql://\u@\h/\d> '
pager = less -FX

What do these settings do?

The prompt setting changes your mysql prompt to tell you what user, server and database you're currently using. This is vastly more useful if you have lots of connections to different mysql databases, which is constantly the case for me when I'm at work. I used the pseudo-url format used by the PEAR::DB module from PHP, which I think is kind of cool.

This makes my prompt look something like:

mysql://nick@localhost/service_demo>

The pager setting makes your query results appear in a pager program like less. Now, it's actually kind of annoying if every single result appears in a pager. So, the -FX flags tell less to avoid itself if what it is paging is less than 1 page height.

These two settings make the clui mysql client vastly more useful.

In 6.0 there will be an auto-vertical setting to use the \G vertical display automatically if the query result is wider than the current window. I thought of adapting this patch to make an auto-pager setting, but then I remembered about the -F flag to less which essentially does the same thing, although I don't know if there is a similar setting to newer pagers like most.

The last sections of the documentation contain lots of useful tips about these two settings -- it's a shame that they're so little known.