Use --pretty-tables (require non-ascii line characters) by default ?

[Simon Michael]

It was suggested in chat yesterday that we should step into the modern age and make --pretty-tables the default, using non-ascii line characters for tabular reports in the terminal.

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/pull/1705 makes this change, adding a general --pretty=yes/no flag, and a NO_PRETTY environment variable that can be used to change the default to off.

What are your thoughts ? Please let us know if you can see this causing significant problems.

My biggest concern is if you run hledger in a terminal environment/font where the standard unicode box drawing characters aren't available, you would see junk characters, which is a bad impression.

It will also create a giant diff for everyone who version-controls their report outputs.

[Jonathan Jouty]

Personally, it sounds like a good move.

Minor feedback to alleviate the giant diff concerns:

- with git you can use --word-diff for a cleaner view

- giant diffs happen anyway in reports with account name changes (or new longer ones), unless you have a max-width naming in place (or some truncation option)

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