Refactor the way output works

[srid]

I use the following script to bulk move emails to another folder:

himalaya -o json search subject Stripe | jq '.[].uid' | xargs -n 1 -I {} himalaya move {} Folders/FinanceLog

This script doesn't output anything, so I have no way of knowing the list of messages that just got moved by that command (that I constructed on the fly). I can script the logging manually, but it would be more convenient if the CLI had an option to log all mutable actions that himalaya takes on my mail account.

[soywod]

In fact the move command (as well as other commands like copy, delete etc) should display a log by default (without any verbose mode). I prefer to introduce a --silent or --quiet flag to disable output instead.

[soywod]

Logs added for copy, move and delete commands + add a --silent flag to disable them. It will be added to the next release!

[srid]

Should --silent be ignored in some commands? For eg., both h --silent and h -o json --silent outputs nothing, but h and h -o json normally would output the list of messages.

Perhaps it would be helpful to distinguish between two kinds of outputs: "content" vs "logging". And use --silent to suppress only the later kind.

[soywod]

It's a good point indeed, I like the idea!

[soywod]

Perhaps it would be helpful to distinguish between two kinds of outputs: "content" vs "logging".

In fact it depends on the ouptut type. For text then indeed you have content and logging. But for json you can only have content. I have an idea on how to implement this, I let you know!

[srid]

Another idea that comes to mind is to send all logging output to stderr, leaving regular output to stdout. Then quiet behaviour can also be achieved using himalaya ... 2> /dev/null (this is the approach used by neuron). But then I wonder if there are better ways.

[soywod]

I am not so fan of this idea, it sounds a bit "hacky". I prefer to keep the stderr for errors only.
I have a working prototype based on the log crate and the env_logger crate:

• A new arg is introduced (and replaces --silent): --log or -l that defines the log level (one of error, warn, info, debug, trace as defined in the log crate)
• The PLAIN output will show logs depending on the given log level (info is the standard default one)
• The JSON output will show only info and error logs:
  • info logs are serialized to JSON strings
  • error logs remains plain strings (this way, a client knows that a command fails if he can't parse the JSON)
• error logs are sent to the stderr channel, and all other logs are sent to the stdout one (no matters the output format)

[soywod]

Added in v0.2.4 🎉