view mercurial/help/templates.txt @ 20689:401f9b661a2d

doc: show short description of each commands in generated documents

Before this patch, short description of each commands is not shown in
generated documents (HTML file and UNIX man page). This omitting may
prevent users from understanding about commands.

This patch show it as the 1st paragraph in the help section of each
commands. This style is chosen because:

  - showing it as the section title in "command - short desc" style
    disallows referencing by "#command" in HTML file: in "en" locale,
    hyphen concatenated title is used as the section ID in HTML file
    for this style

  - showing it as the 1st paragraph in "command - short desc" style
    seems to be redundant: "command" appears also just before as the
    section title

  - showing it just after synopsis like "hg help command" seems not to
    be reasonable in UNIX man page

This patch just writes short description ("d['desc'][0]") before "::",
because it should be already "strip()"-ed in "get_desc()", or empty
string for the command without description.

Mercurial allows you to customize output of commands through
templates. You can either pass in a template from the command
line, via the --template option, or select an existing
template-style (--style).

You can customize output for any "log-like" command: log,
outgoing, incoming, tip, parents, heads and glog.

Five styles are packaged with Mercurial: default (the style used
when no explicit preference is passed), compact, changelog, phases
and xml.
Usage::

    $ hg log -r1 --style changelog

A template is a piece of text, with markup to invoke variable
expansion::

    $ hg log -r1 --template "{node}\n"
    b56ce7b07c52de7d5fd79fb89701ea538af65746

Strings in curly braces are called keywords. The availability of
keywords depends on the exact context of the templater. These
keywords are usually available for templating a log-like command:

.. keywordsmarker

The "date" keyword does not produce human-readable output. If you
want to use a date in your output, you can use a filter to process
it. Filters are functions which return a string based on the input
variable. Be sure to use the stringify filter first when you're
applying a string-input filter to a list-like input variable.
You can also use a chain of filters to get the desired output::

   $ hg tip --template "{date|isodate}\n"
   2008-08-21 18:22 +0000

List of filters:

.. filtersmarker

Note that a filter is nothing more than a function call, i.e.
``expr|filter`` is equivalent to ``filter(expr)``.

In addition to filters, there are some basic built-in functions:

- date(date[, fmt])

- fill(text[, width])

- get(dict, key)

- if(expr, then[, else])

- ifcontains(expr, expr, then[, else])

- ifeq(expr, expr, then[, else])

- join(list, sep)

- label(label, expr)

- revset(query[, formatargs])

- rstdoc(text, style)

- shortest(node)

- strip(text[, chars])

- sub(pat, repl, expr)

Also, for any expression that returns a list, there is a list operator:

- expr % "{template}"

Some sample command line templates:

- Format lists, e.g. files::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "files:\n{files % '  {file}\n'}"

- Join the list of files with a ", "::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "files: {join(files, ', ')}\n"

- Format date::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{date(date, '%Y')}\n"

- Output the description set to a fill-width of 30::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{fill(desc, '30')}"

- Use a conditional to test for the default branch::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{ifeq(branch, 'default', 'on the main branch',
   'on branch {branch}')}\n"

- Append a newline if not empty::

   $ hg tip --template "{if(author, '{author}\n')}"

- Label the output for use with the color extension::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{label('changeset.{phase}', node|short)}\n"

- Invert the firstline filter, i.e. everything but the first line::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{sub(r'^.*\n?\n?', '', desc)}\n"

- Display the contents of the 'extra' field, one per line::

   $ hg log -r 0 --template "{join(extras, '\n')}\n"

- Mark the current bookmark with '*'::

   $ hg log --template "{bookmarks % '{bookmark}{ifeq(bookmark, current, \"*\")} '}\n"

- Mark the working copy parent with '@'::

   $ hg log --template "{ifcontains(rev, revset('.'), '@')}\n"