cli.py truncates long strings

[jeisner]

Only 6 lines are shown in the CLI output. Can this be expanded for long outputs, either automatically or by command-line options?

[houfu]

Hi sorry, I haven't touched the cli part of this for a while, since I was also considering the status of a related project: https://github.com/houfu/redlines-textual

But can I check your use case? Are you talking about long outputs (like just a few more lines) or really long outputs.

[jeisner]

Thanks for the pointer to the related project.

I think redlines CLI is more useful for shorter text that can be compared at the terminal or in a bash_kernel notebook cell.

(To compare versions of longer documents, a diff tool seems more appropriate - it usually lets you jump from change to change. Although I suppose there are times that you just want to read the long document, for example in less, and have a little extra markup along the way, showing what's new.)

When I posted this issue, I was using redlines at the terminal to compare LLM outputs under different prompts. These outputs can vary in length; in my case they were several sentences. I ended up writing my own bare-bones version of the script, which worked fine:

import sys
from redlines import Redlines
from rich import print
print(Redlines(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2]).output_rich)

[houfu]

Thanks! It seems that unlike textual, rich doesn't easily have scrollbars in their panels. So it looks like it will be a limitation for now. But I thought your script made sense so I made it a new command. I wrote the code, but I hope you don't mind if I credit you for it.

[jeisner]

As you like.
Although to prevent a profusion of CLIs, I wonder this should just be an option to your existing script? (I could also imagine the existing script warning of truncation, when it happens, and recommending the option.)