cut lines when trying to read "inbox" from the command-line client

gasche commented 6 years ago

I received an email yesterday saying that I had an encrypted message awaiting in my inbox. The keybase chat --help document is not very helpful in knowing how to read inbox messages, but keybase chat ls apparently tries to do the job:

$ keybase chat ls
[1] * chris [chris 2d] hey @gasche, you provisioned Keybase for linux (devi...
                                                                           
                       This is easily fixed. Our key hasn't changed, but we...
                                                                           
                       If you're not on a debian/ubuntu linux, you shouldn'...

This is the integral output. Notice that the lines are cut with ... added. I have found no way to read the message, that is to have the lines not be cut:

1.keybase chat ls | less or keybase chat ls | cat does not do the job, while they should work.

There is no documentation about line length limits in keybase chat --help or anywere in the documentation that I could find. No documentation online either.
This is terrible, terrible UI design, who would even want the content to be cut by default? Line wrapping makes sense, but I don't see any reason for cutting lines.

gasche commented 6 years ago

Looking through the code:

the code to determine the size of the terminal go/vendor/golang.org/x/crypto/ssh/terminal/util.go , and it does not seem to contain a way to use environment variables to override the terminal length
the code that uses the size of the terminal as width is in go/client/chat_cli_rendering.go, and it does not try to set an arbitrary width if the stdout is not a TTY/terminal (which would make | cat work)
the code that does the cell rendering using the given width and makes the barbaric decision to just cut the content (instead of wrapping etc.) is in go/flexibletable/cells.go

It seems that there is no reasonable way to override this setting, which means that the command-line client as of today is basically unusable to read messages.

ToxicFrog commented 5 years ago

You can use keybase chat read to read the entire message content; it will hard-wrap lines rather than hard-truncating them.

keybase / keybase-issues

cut lines when trying to read "inbox" from the command-line client #3120