can you turn on --compact by default?

[Brian Hicks]

In my build setup, I have a lot of long-running commands. To make life nicer for my team, I'd like to enable compact output by default—that way we know what commands are still running.

The --compact output looks ideal for this! But I don't see any documentation about it (or what the "auto" value means?) I had a look through the code and don't see anything that jumps out at me there either.

So, is this possible? How? If I choose to do this, are there any gotchas I should be aware of?