Allow --delete and --change-time without confirmation

[micahellison]

Feature Request

Use Case/Motivation

The recently-add interactive delete feature (#434) is nice, but it's interactive. It would be nice to have a "force" option (or whatever name is best) if the user wants to delete without being prompted for each entry. It could be particularly useful for scripts/recipes for shuffling data around, perhaps as a resolution to #968 (moving entries).

Example Usage

Maybe --delete-force would be a good name for this option. For instance, deleting the last entry without confirmation:

jrnl --delete-force -n 1

Since there is a good amount of magic in the argument parsing, that might be a more stable solution than adding a new argument on top of the delete like so:

jrnl --delete --force -n 1

[eshrh]

I think another switch makes most sense (at least in the unix philosophy). Perhaps this force option could void all yesno() prompts? I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to set a force flag and then have yesno always choose yes if it was true.

Personally, I don't want to work on anything that has to do with the CLI interface because I've read stuff about a new arg parsing mechanism.

[guydebros]

At the very least, the --delete-force or --delete-yes should come after the filter arguments, similar to jrnl @tag -10 --edit for example.

jrnl -10 --delete -y looks nice and straightforward to me, but I know nothing about the underlying code (or any code, for that matter, since I'm a novice and haven't looked at it yet). In the 5-10 seconds it took to type jrnl -from 2009-01-31 -to 2012-02-03 @tag -starred --delete -y I've probably put an adequate amount of thought into what I intend to do, and I'll be satisfied that jrnl did what I asked it to do. A final "are you really sure" Y is an adequate safeguard, imo.

Another idea, if it hasn't already been mentioned, and if it's possible: jrnl -10 --delete returns a list (short-form) of the entries to be deleted, or a message like "This will delete 132 entries from 1/31/2009 to 2/3/2012, are you sure you want to proceed?" And the choices would be "y/N/i" where i = interactive.

Issue #968 was inspired by a feature in my text editor that selects lines according to some criterion, deletes them from the file but dumps them in a temporary file so I can look them over quickly and make sure it did what I wanted. The --move command could be useful as a behind-the-scenes failsafe for the --delete command.

[micahellison]

Thanks for the responses! It sounds like having the force behavior as a separate argument makes the most sense. I like the notion that it could operate on a variety of prompts, and it really isn't that normative to have a single "delete-force" argument anyway.

The y/N/i idea is cool too. I'll spin that off to a separate issue.

Let's revisit this as we make progress on the argument parsing.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[micahellison]

A resolution to this issue should affect --change-time as well (#1429).